On the evening of December 1, 2014, 38-year-old Ali Sabir, a Black / African American man from Newark, New Jersey, was caught in a burst of gunfire that shattered the routine quiet of Belmont Terrace in the city’s South Ward. Police were called to the block at around 7:37 p.m., responding to reports of shots fired. When officers arrived, they found Sabir lying on the street with multiple gunshot wounds, gravely injured on the pavement of the residential neighborhood he called home.
Emergency responders rushed him to University Hospital, but despite efforts to save him, he was pronounced dead there at 8:08 p.m., his life ending less than an hour after the first calls for help went out.
His death did not occur in isolation, but in the middle of a particularly violent stretch for Newark. That Monday night shooting was recorded as the city’s 86th homicide of 2014 and, grimly, the seventh killing in as many days, underscoring how relentless the bloodshed had become. In the days around Thanksgiving, Newark had already been shaken by a spate of eleven shootings that left four people dead and several others wounded, a grim backdrop against which Sabir’s killing unfolded. Local coverage at the time described how his death, followed within days by another fatal shooting, added to a rising sense of alarm, prompting city leaders to talk publicly about expanding police patrols, opening a new precinct, and focusing enforcement on areas and activities believed to be driving the violence.
On Belmont Terrace itself, the impact lingered long after the crime scene tape was removed. In later years, people discussing the case online described a neighborhood changed by the killing, with some residents saying they no longer felt comfortable letting their children play outside after dark and that the block had taken on an uneasy quiet since Sabir’s death. The shooting did not just mark a statistic in a violent year; it left behind friends, family, and neighbors who remembered him in tributes and memorials. On at least one online remembrance page, dozens of virtual candles have been lit in his name, accompanied by photos and short messages from those who knew him, small digital gestures that suggest a man whose absence is still deeply felt.
From the outset, the investigation into the killing was handled by Newark police and the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office Homicide and Major Crimes units. Detectives cordoned off the teens block of Belmont Terrace, documenting the scene where Sabir had been struck multiple times, and authorities quickly appealed to the public for help, releasing the dedicated Homicide and Major Crimes tips line and urging anyone with information to come forward. Yet, even in the first days after the shooting, officials acknowledged that they had no clear leads to share. As of the night after the killing, police reported that no arrests had been made and no suspects had been identified, a status that remained unchanged when the case was mentioned again in follow-up coverage later that week. Years on, public case summaries and homicide-tracking sites still list the homicide as unsolved and actively seeking information, with no record of a suspect being publicly named or charged in connection with the shooting that ended Ali Sabir’s life on that December night.
