The long-awaited arrest of two suspects for the overdose death of his brother in a Bronx robbery left the victim’s younger sibling struggling Thursday with his deeply divided emotions.
“They caused such great pain to our family,” said Shafayet Ahmed, 26, of the two suspects busted for the Aug. 6, 2022, killing. “Full hatred and everything. I hope they rot in jail … I want them to sit there with the knowledge that they’ve done this to a family.”
Yet the arrests, Ahmed said, delivered some long-awaited relief to his family after 10 months of waiting and wondering whether the homicide case would be closed and the killers taken into custody.
“It’s been healing in a sense because we wanted to know who did this, and now we have a full answer on what was going on,” the brother said. “And knowing they’re behind bars is solace.”
He spoke Thursday with the Us.Mistertruth after murder charges were brought against defendants Kenwood Allen, 33, of the Bronx, and Sean Shirley, 36, of Queens, in the death of his brother following a night out on the Lower East Side.
Victim Sadath Ahmed, 34, was found dead miles away at Heath Ave. and W. 230th St. in the Bronx, with his family left for months without answers in the aspiring chef’s shocking slaying after the suspects apparently slipped him a dose of fentanyl.
“Being a chef, that was his dream,” said the younger brother. “It was around the pandemic that he decided on becoming a chef. During the lockdown, he went to the Institute of Culinary Education with an eye on bigger things.
“He was really enjoying his job,” Shafayet Ahmed continued. “Every day he would come home and tell us how well he was doing. … He was super-competitive. Any time he would taste something, he’d say, ‘I could totally make this better.’”
The siblings would sit together and watch the Food Network or “The Rachael Ray Show,” with Shafayet recalling “he would not shut up about Italian food” before fondly remembering Sadath’s no-holds-barred approach to life.
“He was loud,” said the kid brother. “He’d call you on your bulls—. He was honest. It was a quality that I liked about him. He was loud and honest.”
Shafayet said the family suspected something was wrong when they received a call from a hospital in the Bronx last August. His sibling told their parents he was headed into Manhattan, so something immediately seemed amiss.
“We didn’t know fully that it was foul play, only that it didn’t seem right for him to be there when he was in the Lower East Side the night before,” he said.
Allen, who was initially charged with two murders, was hit for three more on Thursday, according to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. He allegedly worked with partners like Shirley to drug victims and steal their credit cards and valuables.
The months after Sadath’s death became a constant struggle for the family as they waited for answers, the pain evident on the faces of his parents.
“In the first few months, my parents wouldn’t move from the one spot in the couch that directly looks at the room he was staying in,” he recounted. “My cousin and I would talk with my dad and he would get teary-eyed.”
Shafayet Ahmed recalled awakening in the middle of the night more than once to find his mother sitting alone in the living room, unable to sleep.
The younger brother still reflexively thinks of his oldest sibling when something important happens in his life, like a new job or a new girlfriend, only to face the hard reality that Sadath is not around to listen.
“It’s moments like those that hit the hardest,” he said.