Shukri Muthana, a 43-year-old man from Lackawanna, was killed on June 1, 2026, while working as a store clerk and deli owner in Buffalo, New York. The shooting happened in the afternoon at a store on the 1000 block of Grant Street near Military Road, identified in local reporting as Aref’s Deli. Buffalo police were called there at about 2:38 p.m. for a reported shooting and found Muthana wounded.
He had been shot, and despite the emergency response, he died at the scene.
Muthana’s death was the first known scene in what authorities later described as a string of killings that stretched from Buffalo to nearby Cheektowaga. Not long after police were called to Grant Street, officers in Cheektowaga responded to a home on Ellen Drive, where they found three more victims dead: 26-year-old Aaisha Abdulla and two young boys, later identified in local reporting as 4-year-old Youssef Mohamed and 3-year-old Saif Mohamed. Prosecutors said Abdulla was the suspect’s wife and the boys were his children. Authorities alleged that all three were intentionally killed inside the home after Muthana was shot in Buffalo.
The man accused in the case is Saleh Q. Mohamed, 29, of Cheektowaga. Police and prosecutors said Mohamed was arrested after the killings, and local reports described him being taken into custody after returning to the Cheektowaga scene. He was initially arraigned in Buffalo City Court in connection with Muthana’s death, then also faced charges tied to the deaths of his wife and children. Prosecutors later announced that he had been indicted on three counts of first-degree murder and four counts of second-degree murder, all Class A-I felonies.
According to the Erie County District Attorney’s Office, Mohamed is accused of intentionally causing Muthana’s death at the Grant Street store and intentionally causing the deaths of Abdulla and the two children at the Ellen Drive home. He has been held without bail. Prosecutors said that if convicted of the highest counts, he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison without parole. A pre-trial conference was scheduled for July 8, 2026.
Investigators had not publicly established a clear motive for Muthana’s killing in the available reports. Local coverage noted that authorities were still searching for the reason he was targeted, and there was no confirmed public explanation of any relationship between Muthana and Mohamed. That uncertainty left the Grant Street shooting especially troubling for those who knew Muthana as a familiar neighborhood figure.
In the days after the killings, Muthana was remembered by people in the community as kind and caring to those he served at the deli. Hundreds gathered at the Lackawanna Islamic Mosque for his funeral, and mourners also gathered for Abdulla and her two sons. The deaths shocked the Buffalo-area Muslim and Yemeni communities, with community members and leaders describing the loss as devastating and difficult to understand.
