Reginald Brooks said the gun fired during a struggle, but jurors convicted him of murder and a firearm enhancement.
FORT WAYNE, Ind. — Reginald Brooks told investigators that a handgun fired after he “barely touched the trigger.” More than a year later, an Allen County jury rejected the account, convicted him of murdering his girlfriend, and set the stage for an 85-year prison sentence.
The statement Brooks made after Sajdah Abdur-Rabb was fatally shot became an important part of the public account of the case because it captured the central conflict jurors would ultimately have to resolve. Brooks did not deny being involved in the confrontation over the gun. His account instead portrayed the discharge as the end of a chaotic struggle over a weapon that other people had also handled. Prosecutors presented evidence of prior threats and an escalating argument. After a four-day trial, jurors deliberated for about one hour and 20 minutes before finding Brooks guilty of murder and a firearm enhancement.
The trial ended Sept. 25, 2026, in Allen Superior Court. The Allen County Prosecutor’s Office later announced that Deputy Prosecutors Tasha Lee, Ashley Skibinski and Daylan Schurg tried the case. The Fort Wayne Police Department Homicide Unit investigated the killing, and the Indiana State Police Laboratory assisted. The conviction was followed on Oct. 30 by the maximum punishment reported as available in the case: 85 years in prison. Allen Superior Court Judge Fran Gull also ordered Brooks to pay $7,150 in restitution.
To understand why the jury rejected Brooks’ explanation, the case goes back to the day before the shooting. Court documents reported by local media said Brooks had been drinking and had threatened Abdur-Rabb and her teenage son. The son later told detectives that Brooks had threatened to kill them. Those allegations became part of the prosecution’s account of what happened before the Jan. 30, 2025, gunfire and gave investigators a possible sequence in which the shooting followed threats rather than appearing as an isolated firearms accident.
The confrontation continued the next day at a mobile home park off Dunkelberg Road on Fort Wayne’s south side. Abdur-Rabb and Brooks were arguing, according to the reports. Her son was also present. The son told police that Brooks had a gun and that Abdur-Rabb knocked it away. The teenager handled the weapon during the struggle before it came back into Brooks’ possession. The accounts reported from the probable cause affidavit describe a volatile series of events involving the gun moving among people inside the home.
Brooks sought to explain that sequence in his interview with police. He said he did not ordinarily keep a round chambered in the gun and indicated that Abdur-Rabb or her son might have loaded it while it was out of his control. Brooks said he regained the handgun and then struggled with Abdur-Rabb over it. He maintained that the shot occurred when he barely touched the trigger. His description placed emphasis on how the gun discharged. Investigators, however, were also examining what Brooks had said and done before that moment.
A separate witness gave police information that supported the allegation that threats were being made immediately before the shooting. According to the affidavit account reported by 21Alive, a woman said her brother called her because he was frightened and Brooks was armed. She said she heard Brooks threatening their mother in the background of the call. She then heard a gunshot. That account was significant because it described the confrontation from outside the room while it was unfolding rather than only after police arrived.
Officers responded to the mobile home after the shooting and found Abdur-Rabb suffering from a gunshot wound. She was taken to an area hospital but did not survive. Brooks was detained at the scene and booked into the Allen County Jail. The Allen County Coroner’s Office later ruled Abdur-Rabb’s death a homicide. She was 50 years old.
The early arrest did not itself establish Brooks’ guilt. For more than a year, the allegations remained subject to the criminal-court process. Prosecutors ultimately carried the murder case through trial, where the state had to prove its charge to a jury. The firearm enhancement was considered with the murder count. Jurors’ guilty findings meant that the fact-finders accepted the prosecution’s case beyond the level required for conviction and did not accept Brooks’ account as a reason to find the shooting accidental rather than criminal.
The verdict also changed how earlier statements in the case had to be described. Immediately after the shooting, reports properly referred to Brooks as a suspect or defendant and attributed the allegations to police and court records. After the September 2026 verdict, he was no longer merely accused of murder. A jury had convicted him. The sentencing a month later then fixed the punishment at 85 years, rather than the potential maximum cited in coverage published before the hearing.
Abdur-Rabb’s family had been speaking publicly about the human consequences of the killing long before the trial. Relatives said she was the mother of nine children, with the youngest reported to have been 11, and a grandmother to 10. A fundraiser created after her death said the family was in shock. One of her sons told 21Alive that his mother had been the family’s protector and a central figure in their lives. Those comments showed that while the criminal case focused on a gun, threats, witness accounts and legal standards, the loss extended across a large family.
The family also publicly described the case as domestic violence. That characterization appeared in a fundraiser established after Abdur-Rabb’s death and was consistent with the relatives’ account of an intimate relationship marked by threats immediately before the shooting. The criminal prosecution, however, proceeded on the specific legal charges of murder and the firearm enhancement. The jury’s task was to decide those charges from the evidence presented at trial, not to resolve broader questions about domestic violence generally.
Official information released after the verdict added a measure of how quickly the jury reached its decision. The four-day presentation of the case was followed by approximately 80 minutes of deliberations. The prosecutor’s office then publicly confirmed the guilty verdicts and scheduled Brooks for sentencing before Judge Gull. That hearing answered the final major trial-court question left open by the verdict.
On Oct. 30, Judge Gull imposed the 85-year term and $7,150 in restitution. The sentence matched the maximum prison exposure that had been reported after the conviction. It also gave new finality to a story that initially centered on Brooks’ statement about the trigger. Whatever explanation he gave investigators in January 2025, the jury later found him guilty of murder, and the court imposed the maximum sentence.
The publicly available reports reviewed for this story do not show a later court decision overturning the verdict or reducing the sentence. As of Nov. 9, Brooks stands convicted of murder and the firearm enhancement in Abdur-Rabb’s death and is subject to the 85-year prison term imposed by Allen Superior Court.
Author note: Last updated Nov. 9, 2026.