On the evening of March 20, 2019, Hakeem Salahud-din, a 21-year-old Black / African American male, was at Cal Anderson Park in Seattle's Capitol Hill neighborhood. The Federal Way resident had gone to the park's basketball courts with friends for a game. What began as a recreational evening took a tragic turn when a disturbance broke out nearby. According to his family, Salahud-din, a father and son, stepped in to intervene in a fight in an attempt to help someone he knew.
Prosecutors later stated that the altercation involved his 17-year-old sister being struck. In the midst of this chaotic scene, a single gunshot was fired, and Salahud-din was struck in the head. Emergency services were called to the park around 9:40 PM, but he was pronounced dead at the scene.
The sudden violence left a profound void in the lives of his loved ones. Hakeem Salahud-din was a young father to two daughters, aged one and two, and his fiancée was pregnant with their third child, due in August, just a day after what would have been his 22nd birthday. His family remembered him as someone who would step in to help another person, a quality they believe cost him his life. In the months following the shooting, they pleaded for witnesses to come forward and provide any information that could lead to an arrest, hoping for some measure of peace and justice for his children.
The Seattle Police Department's homicide detectives took on the case, interviewing numerous witnesses who were present at the busy park that night. However, the investigation initially struggled to identify a suspect. Five months after the killing, in an effort to generate new leads, the department released a video plea to the public, urging those with knowledge of the shooter's identity to come forward. Investigators believed that the suspect did not act alone and that his identity was known among people at the park. Through their investigation, which reportedly involved using Facebook to connect the suspect to a relative also involved in the fight and video from a nearby apartment, authorities eventually identified a suspect.
In June 2020, over a year after the shooting, an arrest was made thousands of miles away. Zaquai McCray, a 19-year-old from Tacoma at the time of the incident, was taken into custody in Columbus, Georgia. He was extradited back to King County, Washington, and charged with second-degree murder in connection with Hakeem Salahud-din's death. McCray was held on two million dollars bail as he awaited trial for the shooting that cut a young father's life short.
