On January 6, 2012, a Nigerian male, 44, Olufemi Abdulai pulled up to the 4400 block of West Monroe Street to do the ordinary rounds of a landlord. He'd spoken to his wife late that morning, she was out of the country, and told her he was going to collect rent; a fellow landlord had just met him at the car and driven off.
Not long after noon, gunshots cracked the winter air.
From a second-floor window across the street, a neighbor saw a man in a steel-gray hoodie with his face covered move away from Abdulai's dark foreign car and head toward a nearby gangway. Another witness on the corner had watched a masked man emerge from an alley by a vacant three-flat, cross to Abdulai's BMW and tussle with him; Abdulai fell back into the driver's seat as shots were fired. When the chaos ebbed, neighbors called for help, and the routine errand a husband had set out to run was over.
Police soon learned more. In a prior statement introduced at trial, a bystander described the gunman pointing a black revolver at Abdulai, patting him down, and then firing five shots before disappearing back through the same gangway.
Another witness, known the block and later called to the stand, ran to Abdulai's side and stayed with him until the ambulance arrived.
The stark details from the block told the same story: a daylight robbery turned murder, carried out with speed and familiarity with the cut-throughs behind Monroe.
Hours later, officers on plainclothes patrol met the man who would become the prime suspect. Around 2:50 p.m., they approached Desmond Young on the West Side; he fled, and as he ran they saw him pull a handgun and toss it over a wrought-iron fence. The weapon, a blue-steel revolver, was recovered loaded with nine live rounds, and Young was detained nearby.
At that point he was booked on weapons and cannabis charges, but the encounter would knit him to the killing on Monroe as detectives and prosecutors gathered statements, recordings, and physical evidence.
What followed was the slow work of building a case. Young's girlfriend told jurors he had driven into the alley behind Monroe shortly before the shooting and left on foot down a gangway; later that day she drove him as he changed locations and clothes.
In a recorded phone call from jail, a friend confronted Young with what people on the block had seen; in another conversation recounted in court, a witness said Young told her, “I saw a lick, and I went for it,” after noticing the landlord with a bankroll,.
Investigators also recovered the jeans Young had allegedly worn; testing detected gunshot residue, evidence the defense tried and failed to keep from the jury. Piece by piece, a picture formed that aligned with the first frightened glimpses from windows and sidewalks.
A jury convicted Desmond Young of first-degree murder and armed robbery in 2018. The trial judge imposed a total sentence of 96 years, 40 years for murder, a mandatory 25 year firearm enhancement, and 31 years for armed robbery to run consecutively, emphasizing that Abdulai had been robbed at gunpoint and shot five times.
The convictions were affirmed on direct appeal in 2021, and in 2025 the appellate court upheld the 96-year sentence, calling it fair and appropriate in light of the evidence and the gravity of the crimes.
In the years after the shooting, Abdulai's name has appeared in the public remembrances that lace together the stories behind Chicago's homicide statistics. At one such gathering, his wife, who had waited for a call that never came, spoke for those left to carry on.
The city's violence, she said, inflicts the most painful goodbyes, the ones “never said and never explained.” He had been out doing the most everyday task of a landlord when the world around him closed in.
Abdulai's age 44. and the noontime killing on the 4400 block of West Monroe were reported that week by local outlets citing the Cook County medical examiner.
