Said Saad, a 47-year-old man from East Chicago, Indiana, built his life around a small tire shop on East Ridge Road in Gary, a business he had opened in the mid-2010s and later expanded by partnering with U-Haul so he could rent trucks and trailers to his neighbors as well as fix their cars. At Happy Way Tire Shop, he was more than just the person behind the counter; customers and local officials alike knew him as a hardworking owner who kept long hours and tried to make his shop a dependable
stop on a busy stretch of road. Friends later described how he would help people out, how he seemed to put the community first, a small-business figure woven into the daily rhythms of that corner of Lake County.
On the afternoon of August 29, 2022, the ordinary flow of business at the shop was shattered. Around 4:59 p.m., a Gary police officer patrolling near Ridge Road and Georgia Street was waved down by a frantic passerby who said someone was actively shooting into a nearby business just to the east. The officer radioed for help and moved toward the shop, where he found a man outside with a gunshot wound to his right leg. That wounded customer, a 27-year-old from Valparaiso, told the officer that his friend inside had also been shot, turning a quiet workday into a scene of sudden terror.
As more officers secured the area and firefighters rushed in, they found Saad inside the business, unresponsive and without a pulse. Emergency personnel could do nothing; he was pronounced dead at the scene, his shop floor becoming the place where his life ended. The wounded customer was rushed to Methodist Hospital, where authorities said he was in good condition after being treated for the gunshot to his leg. In the immediate aftermath, investigators said they believed the shooting took place during a robbery attempt at the tire shop, turning an everyday business transaction into a deadly confrontation.
Witnesses and early reports gave police a narrow window into who had done this. Detectives released a description of the gunman as a Black male, about 5 feet 10 inches tall with a thin build, who was considered armed and dangerous and was last seen fleeing in a dark-colored sedan away from the shop along East Ridge Road. Officers canvassed the area while Lake County Metro Homicide asked the public for information, advertising tip-line numbers and stressing that the shooter had opened fire in broad daylight at a local business, killing the owner and wounding a customer before disappearing into traffic.
In the days that followed, the story of what had happened to Saad spread beyond the crime scene tape. Local television coverage described him as a “community-first guy,” a “cool” business owner who would give someone “the shirt off his back,” while Gary’s mayor recalled meeting him earlier in his administration and praised him as a gracious, engaged businessman who had contributed meaningfully to the city. Online memorials repeated those themes: he was remembered as the face of Happy Way Tire Shop, a man who brought joy to people around him and whose nickname and smiling photos stood in sharp contrast to the violence of his final moments.
For a time after the shooting, authorities emphasized that no one was in custody and that the investigation was ongoing, the suspect still described only by a brief physical description and the getaway car. Later, regional reporting from The Times of Northwest Indiana, referenced in social media postings, indicated that police ultimately arrested a man in connection with the homicide at the tire shop, accusing him of fatally shooting Saad and wounding the employee during the August 29 attack. A subsequent notice from the same outlet’s social media feed stated that the man who allegedly shot the shop owner and his employee had been denied bail, suggesting that he was ordered held in custody while facing serious charges tied to the killing. However, the publicly viewable summaries do not detail the exact counts filed against him or the eventual outcome of the case, leaving unanswered questions about how the courts resolved the accusations and whether a trial or plea ever formally closed the book on the killing that ended Saad’s life and shook his corner of Gary.
