SANTA CRUZ — A Hayward man was sentenced to a prison term of 68 years to life Friday for what a Santa Cruz judge described as an “egregious” and violent highway road rage shooting last year in Aptos.
Raphael Abduh-Salam had been released from prison on parole just six months when he encountered a Scotts Valley family of five traveling southbound on Highway 1 on the night of May 26, 2023. Abduh-Salam reportedly was driving erratically and cut off the family. The driver of the family’s car ultimately struck Abduh-Salam’s vehicle from behind when he hit the brakes. The two vehicles then moved to exit the highway at Freedom Boulevard, where Abduh-Salam is said to have turned perpendicularly, blocking the exit, and pointed his gun out the driver’s side window at close range.
“Mr. Abduh-Salam almost took the most valuable thing we have in the most horrible way possible,” victim advocate Phillip Tatum said, reading an impact statement written to the court by the family’s mother, Adrianna Santiago.
In August, a jury found Abduh-Salam, 34, fired 15 rounds into the family’s vehicle, striking the driver twice in the abdomen and grazing a 3-year-old’s arm. The jury found Abduh-Salam guilty of attempted murder, shooting into an occupied vehicle, two counts of assault with a semiautomatic weapon, illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition and several felony enhancements. This week, Santa Cruz County Superior Court Judge Leila Sayar upheld as a criminal strike Abduh-Salam’s 2015 Sacramento County conviction for separate assaults in 2013 and 2014, in addition to handing down his sentence.
Defense attorney Manuel Nieto argued Friday that while witnesses to the confrontation gave different descriptions of the shooter, they all agreed that the shooter was aiming for the other vehicle’s driver and so should be consolidated rather than applied to multiple victims. Sayar responded that, regardless of Abduh-Salam’s purported aim, there were bullets sprayed all over the vehicle.
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Cynthia Carter, Abduh-Salam’s mother, told the court that the descriptions of her son’s actions were “not who he is” and that, after being himself shot as a child, would not subject others to the same. Carter alleged that police had planted a gun in her home while searching it and that her son was not the type to defend himself or fight back. According to a defense court filing, Abduh-Salam was injured in a bus stop drive-by shooting when he was a 14-year-old living in San Francisco. His older brother was fatally shot the year prior.
“I hope you would turn your sentence around,” Carter said. “I hope you will because my son is not a menace to society.”
Sayar said she was aware of Abduh-Salam’s teenage trauma and therefore found it “incredibly perplexing” that he would subject a family with two small children to the same. What would otherwise have been “a nothing incident” of someone being cut off on the road “turned into a horrific act of violence,” Sayar said.
Abduh-Salam was credited with 287 days of time served.
