A 28-year-old man is dead and another is hospitalized after a verbal dispute inside a Manhattan deli erupted into gunfire on a Saturday night in Alphabet City, and as of Sunday afternoon, police had made no arrests.
Abdul Saleh was struck in the torso outside Sal's Deli and Grocery at the intersection of Avenue B and East 13th Street, the New York Post reported. EMS rushed him to Bellevue, where he was pronounced dead. A second unidentified 28-year-old man, also shot in the torso, was listed in stable condition at the same hospital.
Cops said the gunfire broke out around 11:38 p.m. Law enforcement sources told the Post that the shooting was sparked by a verbal dispute that started inside the deli and spilled onto the street. No further details about the argument's content, or the identity of the shooter, have been released.
Saleh's cousin, 31-year-old Emmad El-Hassil, told the Post that Saleh worked at the family-owned deli and had just returned from visiting relatives in Yemen. El-Hassil, who works at another deli a block away, described learning the news from neighborhood residents who rushed into his store.
El-Hassil recalled the moment:
"Guys that live in the neighborhood, they came into my store and they said 'Abdul got shot!' 'Abdul got shot!'"
He added that his cousin had only resumed working that same day. "He just started working again today," El-Hassil said.
A pizza chef at nearby Pop's Pizza gave a grim account of the shooting's aftermath. He said he was working when the shots rang out.
"I was making the pizza and I heard a 'pop' and then after a while another 'pop.'"
The employee said one of the wounded men staggered up the block and collapsed onto a bench directly in front of the pizza shop. "One guy walked up the block, holding his belly, and sat down right here," the chef said. "He sat down on the bench, holding his belly."
As of Sunday afternoon, authorities had not announced any arrests. The identity of the second victim has not been released. Police have not disclosed whether they are pursuing specific suspects or what charges might follow.
The case leaves a long list of unanswered questions. What provoked the argument inside the deli? Who fired the shots? Was the shooter known to the victims, or a stranger? None of that has been addressed publicly.
For Saleh's family, the timeline is almost unbearable. He traveled to Yemen to see relatives. He came home. He went back to work at the family business. And before the night was over, he was dead on a sidewalk in Lower Manhattan.
The killing fits a pattern that New Yorkers know too well, a minor dispute, a firearm, and a life ended in seconds on a city street. The question residents keep asking is whether anyone in charge treats these deaths with the urgency they deserve.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani has already faced criticism for how he frames gun violence. After a baby was killed in an earlier shooting, Mamdani drew fire for blaming "gun violence" as an abstraction rather than holding the criminals responsible.
That framing matters because it shapes policy. When leaders treat shootings as a statistical category instead of individual acts of criminal violence, accountability gets lost in the rhetoric.
Meanwhile, the city's broader public-safety picture has not inspired confidence. Transit crime has worsened, with subway and bus robberies surging 21 percent after Mamdani's overtime cuts thinned police patrols.
Fewer cops on the street and softer rhetoric from City Hall do not deter the kind of person who settles a deli argument with a gun. The people who live and work along Avenue B, the deli owners, the pizza chefs, the families on the block, already know that.
Mamdani's first months in office have drawn scrutiny on multiple fronts. His administration's record on public safety, housing, and homelessness has been catalogued in detail, with critics pointing to a trail of broken promises across his first 100 days.
None of this is new territory for New York. The city has cycled through these debates before. A former NYC mayor has even admitted that defunding police was not a smart move, an acknowledgment that came only after the damage was done.
Abdul Saleh's family is left to grieve a young man who came home from Yemen, walked back into his family's deli, and never walked out alive. The second victim remains unnamed and hospitalized. The shooter, whoever it is, remains free.
Investigators have released almost nothing. Whether the case produces a swift arrest or joins the city's backlog of unsolved shootings will say more about the state of law enforcement in Manhattan than any press conference.
A man went back to work at his family's store. By midnight he was gone. Somewhere in New York, the person who killed him is still walking around, and so far, nobody in authority seems to be in any hurry about it.
