Abdul Saleh begged for protection. New York City ignored him, and now he’s dead.

He told a reporter exactly what he feared. No one acted on it.

In May 2025, ABC7 Eyewitness News reporter Kemberly Richardson was covering Mayor Eric Adams (D)’s SilentShield panic button rollout. The program, funded at $1.6 million, would equip 500 bodegas across New York City with devices that silently alert the NYPD and give officers direct access to in-store surveillance cameras. Richardson visited Sal’s Deli & Grocery at 216 Avenue B in the East Village. Saleh’s deli was not in the program.

Saleh stood on camera and described what he saw on social media: bodega workers being shot, workers being robbed, and police arriving hours after the fact. “People got shot and killed, and somebody gets robbed, and police — they come three, four hours late,” he said. He was not angry. He was worried. He had watched it happen to other people. He could see it coming for him.

That interview sat on ABC7’s servers for eleven months. The city’s panic button program list was finalized and deployed. Sal’s Deli at Avenue B and East 13th Street never appeared on it. No panic button. No camera link to the NYPD. No protection.

“Always something happens, and no one really cares.”

Abdul Saleh, to ABC7 Eyewitness News, May 2025 — eleven months before his murder

Federal gang bust in 2016. Nearly a dozen arrests. One block from the deli.

Kavone Horton, 28, was not a stranger to the neighborhood or to law enforcement. He lived with his mother at Campos Plaza II Houses, a New York City Housing Authority complex less than one block from Sal’s Deli. Workers at the deli had filed four police reports about Horton before the night he allegedly shot Saleh. At one point, Horton had been banned from the store for approximately a year.

But Horton’s history extended far beyond neighborhood disputes. In April 2016, federal prosecutors under then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara charged 120 members and associates of two rival Bronx street gangs — 2Fly YGz and Big Money Bosses — in what was then the largest gang takedown in New York City history. Horton, who went by the street name “Styles,” was among the 57 individuals indicted as members of 2Fly YGz. The charges included racketeering conspiracy, narcotics distribution within 1,000 feet of a school and public housing, and weapons offenses.

The 2Fly YGz gang war, according to the federal indictment, left a 15-year-old stabbed and left for dead and killed a 92-year-old woman struck by a stray bullet inside her own home. Despite the breadth of those charges, Horton was sentenced to time already served in 2017 and released on supervised federal release. He returned to the East Village. He continued accumulating arrests. Law enforcement sources told reporters he had nearly a dozen prior arrests by the time he walked into Sal’s Deli on the night of April 26, 2026.

“He had been making threats against [the brothers] for well over a year.”

Saleh family member, to amNewYork, April 2026 — describing Kavone Horton's documented harassment campaign

The city spent $1.6 million to protect 500 bodegas. His was not one of them.

In May 2025, Mayor Eric Adams (D) announced the SilentShield program at a Bronx bodega: $1.6 million to install panic buttons in 500 New York City bodegas. When triggered, the devices silently alert the NYPD and give officers real-time access to in-store surveillance cameras. Adams said the bodegas selected would be those in the highest-crime areas, and he declined to name them publicly so potential offenders could not plan around the coverage.

That selection logic is its own accusation. The highest-crime bodegas would be covered. But Sal’s Deli on Avenue B — which had filed four police reports about one specific threat, which employed a worker who had made his fear public on local television, and which sat one block from a NYCHA complex connected to a federal gang defendant — was not selected. The question the city has not answered is why.

The United Bodegas of America, which represents bodega owners citywide, responded to Saleh’s killing by calling on elected officials to expand the program so that every bodega in New York could have a direct panic line to the NYPD. The organization announced a $5,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the shooter. Fernando Mateo, UBA spokesman, said: “We stand with Abdul’s family and will continue fighting for stronger protections for all bodega workers.”

His last words were about his children. The city still won’t let them in.

Abdul Saleh had just returned from Yemen weeks before he was shot. He went to visit his wife and their two children: a 3-year-old daughter and a 2-year-old son. The family could not travel with him to the United States. As he lay dying on the sidewalk outside Sal’s Deli, he turned to his brother and said: “Please, brother, take care of my family.”

Those children are still in Yemen. After the killing, the Saleh family formally requested that Mayor Adams’s office and New York’s congressional delegation work with the U.S. State Department to authorize humanitarian travel visas so the children could attend their father’s funeral and join family in the United States. As of the date of publication, no humanitarian authorization has been granted.

Saleh’s funeral was held at the Beit El-Maqdis Islamic Center in Brooklyn. More than 100 mourners attended, including his father, Ahmed Saleh, and his two brothers. Saleh’s wife and children were not there. Attorney General Letitia James (D) attended the candlelight vigil outside the deli. The community described Saleh as someone who refused to let a hungry person leave empty-handed, who knew the names of everyone on the block, who treated the neighborhood as family. “I treated him like my son, and he called me mama,” one longtime customer told reporters.

“Please, brother, take care of my family.”

Abdul Saleh's dying words to his brother, April 26, 2026 — reported by amNewYork

Bodega workers have been sounding the alarm for years. The city keeps announcing programs.

New York City has approximately 14,000 bodegas. The SilentShield panic button program covers 500 of them — about 3.5 percent. The program was announced with significant fanfare by Mayor Adams in May 2025. The locations selected were in “highest-crime areas,” a designation the mayor refused to disclose publicly. No criteria for selection were published. No audit of the selection process has been released.

Bodega advocates have noted for years that the workers most at risk — those who have already had run-ins with specific, identifiable, repeat harassers — are precisely the ones the city needs to prioritize. A general “high-crime area” designation does not respond to individualized documented threats. Four police reports about one specific named individual constitute an individualized documented threat. The city had that information. Sal’s Deli was not in the program.

Abdul Saleh is not the first bodega worker to die after a system that was supposed to protect him failed. He will not be the last unless the city’s elected leadership — Mayor Adams (D), DA Bragg (D), and the City Council majority — changes the calculus that keeps returning documented violent offenders to the streets and neighborhoods they prey on.