Well-known Baltimore arabber shot and killed by Baltimore Police officers

Well-known Baltimore arabber Bilal Abdullah was shot by members of the Baltimore Police Department near Penn North around 7:30 yesterday evening and pronounced dead at Shock Trauma at 11:14 p.m. 

BPD has not released Abdullah’s name, the names of any of the shooting officers, or the officer reported to have been shot in the foot. Three members of the arabber community and one of Abdullah’s family members have confirmed his identity to Baltimore Beat.

Abdullah, who was known as “BJ” for Bilal Junior, was born into arabbing, or the tradition of selling produce along city streets in a colorful horse-drawn wagon, enticing customers with distinctive cries for watermelons, cantaloupe, or other fruit. 

“[He] came up in the stables. His dad had a lot of horses and he was one of the most hardcore arabbers for a number of years,” says M. Holden Warren, former president of Baltimore’s Arabber Preservation Society and co-founder of Stable Baltimore, a nonprofit dedicated to horse culture and healing in Baltimore. “Every day, he was out with a horse covering the whole city. He went [the] distance.” 

“He had customers everywhere. He was one of the old-school guys. He had real routes. People relied on him.” 

Levar Mullen, a life-long arabber and violence interrupter who also co-founded Stable Baltimore, has known Abdullah all his life. He recalls that when Abdullah was too young to go arabbing himself, “every time we would go through there with a wagon, man, he would follow us for blocks. When I tell you about the term ‘horse crazy,’ it was BJ,” Mullen says. 

“I walk about 24 miles a day,” Abdullah told Mic in a 2018 story. “I gotta keep new shoes. The soles be gone on them.” He said that he would often take kids on his route. 

Abdullah was the subject of a lengthy Eater profile in 2014, where he was dubbed “the last of the arabbers.” 

“If I didn’t have this wagon, the police would be chasing me,” Abdullah told Eater more than a decade ago. According to BPD, that is what happened on Tuesday night. 

“On June 17, 2025, at approximately 7:17 p.m., Officers were patrolling near the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and Laurens Street when they observed an adult male believed to be armed,” BPD spokesperson Lindsey Eldridge wrote in a statement. They did not provide information on why the officers believed him to be armed. 

Commissioner Richard Worley told reporters at a news briefing that the person began to run. According to police, the individual they were chasing fired a weapon, hitting a veteran officer in the foot as three officers opened fire on him. 

The Office of the Attorney General will be investigating the shooting, as it has since October 2023, when a new law gave that office, instead of the State’s Attorney’s Office, the power to investigate police shootings. 

“The AG’s Office will release the identity of male and officers,” BPD’s Eldridge wrote in response to questions about the identity of those involved, noting that it usually takes “within 2-4 business days.” Eldridge also said that BPD would be releasing body camera footage in accordance with its policies. 

Abdullah, who had worked out of the Fremont Street stable, a short distance from where he was shot, was well known in the community. A stand-off developed between residents and police, as dozens of officers were deployed to the area, while people expressed anger and grief. 

In his briefing, Worley seemed to place blame on the community for Abdullah’s death. “The crowd actually interfered with our ability to give the victim aid,” Worley said. “Officers from all around the city had to come to kind of quash the disturbance so that we could get the victim to the hospital.”

In the Eater story, Abdullah detailed some of his struggles with the criminal justice system, which began when he started selling crack after his father, Bilal Abdullah Sr. died.

 “That’s all you grow up around,” he told the reporter. “You see people wearing the finer things and diamond rings. If that’s what you want, eventually that’s what you end up doing. Then it leads you to a place you don’t want to be.”

“I don’t know what transpired yesterday that led up to that tragic event, but what I can say is that he is not a violent person,” Mullen says. “He didn’t live his life based on violence.” 

Mullen remembers Abdullah as “one of a kind.”

“He was a great arabber, a great family member, [and] a great comrade in the horse world.” 

This story will be updated.