In Indiana, Reginald Brooks received the maximum prison term after jurors rejected his account of a fatal struggle over a handgun.

FORT WAYNE, Ind. — An Indiana man convicted of killing his girlfriend during an argument at a Fort Wayne mobile home was sentenced to 85 years in prison, closing the trial-court phase of a case that began when police found 50-year-old Sajdah Abdur-Rabb mortally wounded in January 2025.

Allen Superior Court Judge Fran Gull sentenced 55-year-old Reginald Brooks on Oct. 30 after a jury found him guilty of murder and a firearm enhancement. Brooks received the maximum sentence and was ordered to pay $7,150 in restitution. The punishment came about five weeks after the four-day trial ended with jurors rejecting his account that the gun fired as he and Abdur-Rabb struggled over the weapon. Prosecutors had presented the shooting in the context of threats Brooks had made before the gunfire, while Brooks told investigators that he had barely touched the trigger when the weapon discharged.

The sentence followed a case in which the decisive question was not whether Brooks was present when Abdur-Rabb was shot, but what happened in the moments leading to the gunfire. Police detained Brooks at the scene on Jan. 30, 2025. Abdur-Rabb was found wounded at a mobile home park off Dunkelberg Road on Fort Wayne’s south side, near Airport Expressway and Bluffton Road. Emergency crews took her to a hospital, where she was pronounced dead. The Allen County Coroner’s Office later classified the death as a homicide.

Investigators learned that the conflict had begun before the day of the shooting. According to court documents cited by local news outlets, Abdur-Rabb’s teenage son told detectives that Brooks had been drinking and had threatened to kill both his mother and him. The son described an argument involving Brooks and a handgun. At one point, he said, Abdur-Rabb knocked the gun away. The weapon changed hands during the confrontation before Brooks regained possession of it, according to accounts of the probable cause affidavit.

Brooks gave detectives a different account of how responsibility for the loaded gun developed. He said Abdur-Rabb knocked the weapon from him and that she and her son handled it. Brooks told police that he did not normally keep a round chambered and suggested that someone else could have loaded the weapon before he recovered it. He said he and Abdur-Rabb then fought over the gun. When it fired, Brooks told investigators, he had “barely touched the trigger.” That statement became one of the most prominent details reported from the case, but it did not persuade the jury that the shooting was an accident.

Another witness added evidence about the threats preceding the shot. According to the probable cause affidavit, a woman told investigators that her brother called her because he felt threatened while Brooks had a gun. During that call, she said, she could hear Brooks in the background threatening their mother. She then heard a gunshot. The account placed the shooting after an escalating dispute and gave investigators evidence beyond Brooks’ own description of a sudden discharge during a fight over the weapon.

Brooks was initially jailed on a preliminary murder allegation after officers responded to the home. Prosecutors later pursued the murder case along with the firearm enhancement. When the case reached trial in September 2026, prosecutors presented it over four days in Allen Superior Court. The Allen County Prosecutor’s Office said Deputy Prosecutors Tasha Lee, Ashley Skibinski and Daylan Schurg handled the case, which had been investigated by the Fort Wayne Police Department Homicide Unit with assistance from the Indiana State Police Laboratory.

The jury’s consideration was relatively brief compared with the length of the trial. The prosecutor’s office said jurors deliberated for about one hour and 20 minutes before finding Brooks guilty of murder and the firearm enhancement. The verdict converted the earlier allegations in the case into findings of guilt and left the length of Brooks’ punishment for the court to decide. At the time of the verdict, officials scheduled sentencing for Oct. 30, when the court imposed the full 85-year term.

Abdur-Rabb’s death left a large family grieving. Her relatives told 21Alive after the shooting that she was the mother of nine children and a grandmother to 10. One of her sons described her as the center of the family and said the loss had left relatives struggling to understand how to move forward. A fundraiser established after her death said the family had been thrown into shock and described the killing as an act of domestic violence that had shattered their lives.

The family’s public comments also shifted attention away from the courtroom details and toward the person lost in the shooting. One son remembered Abdur-Rabb as a mother, friend, protector and source of stability for her children. Those statements came while the criminal case was still in its earliest stages, long before a jury heard evidence and long before a judge imposed sentence. By the time Brooks was convicted in 2026, the family had been living with the consequences of the killing for more than a year and a half.

The case moved through several distinct stages. Police first treated the shooting as an active homicide investigation, with detectives gathering statements from Brooks, Abdur-Rabb’s son and another witness. The coroner then formally ruled the death a homicide. Prosecutors took the case forward on murder and firearm-enhancement allegations. After four days of testimony and evidence, jurors returned guilty findings. The later sentencing resolved the question that remained after the verdict: how much prison time Brooks would receive for the killing and the use of a firearm.

The 85-year sentence is now the controlling development in a story that the original reports framed around Brooks’ pending punishment. When he was convicted in September, he was described as facing as much as 85 years. That possible sentence became the sentence actually imposed on Oct. 30. The court also ordered restitution of $7,150, adding a financial judgment to the prison term.

Nothing in the publicly reviewed reports changes the central findings reached by the jury: Brooks was convicted of murdering Abdur-Rabb and of the related firearm enhancement. His statement that the gun discharged with minimal pressure on the trigger remained part of the investigative record, but the jury did not accept an accidental-shooting account as a basis to acquit him. The sentence imposed by the court reflects those convictions rather than the preliminary allegations that were reported immediately after the shooting.

Brooks is now under an 85-year prison sentence stemming from the Jan. 30, 2025, killing. The sentencing completed the principal trial-court proceeding reported in the case. The available sources reviewed for this report did not establish any later ruling that altered his convictions or sentence.

Author note: Last updated Nov. 9, 2026.