At 3 a.m., a gunman waited behind an Oakland lingerie store on ‘The Blade’, police say. The operator was shot dead minutes later

OAKLAND –At 3:15 a.m. on Dec. 19, long after most local business owners had shuttered their doors, two brothers left the back of their lingerie store in a neighborhood known for sex trafficking and headed to their car in an adjacent alleyway.

That’s when the gunman struck, according to police, firing multiple shots into a 2016 Toyota Prius and striking both men inside. One died before EMTs could take him to a hospital. His brother was struck in the arm but survived, authorities said.

Now, police have identified the deceased victim as 28-year-old Zinatullah Hedayet. Authorities say the shooting appeared targeted and that the suspect waited for more than 10 minutes on the 1600 block of Solano Way, a one-lane roadway directly behind the shop, for the operators to emerge.

Police haven’t publicly identified the suspected motive for the shooting.

Both victims operated a store on the 1600 block of International Boulevard that sold snacks and drinks, but also see-through lingerie, fishnets, high-heeled faux leather boots, and cheap, shiny jewelry, according to its Instagram and Yelp pages. Outside the store, sex workers are known to walk the streets at all hours of the day, in a section of International Boulevard known as “The Blade” that spans more than a mile and is arguably the biggest open air sex market in the Bay Area.

On Yelp, several one-star reviewers derided it as a “pro human trafficking business” and a store with “no shame,” with one April 2024 reviewer writing that a customer at a business next-door had been wounded in a drive-by shooting on the block.  The shop’s Oakland-issued business license expired on New Year’s Eve, 12 days after Hedayet was killed, and its Google page lists it as “permanently closed.”

No one has been charged yet in Hedayet, but authorities say that while there was one gunman, there may be as many as three participants. The gunman was reportedly seen fleeing to a vehicle afterwards.

The store was known to police too. In April 2025, an undercover officer witnessed a suspected sex worker walking into the business. He approached her when she emerged and asked to pay her for a sex act. The woman asked to feel the officer’s groin and he allowed her to, in order to prove he wasn’t a cop, then he arrested her after she quoted him $80 for oral sex, according to the police report. Authorities noted the woman had prior arrests for prostitution in Los Angeles and identified a man as her suspected pimp, but never charged him, court records show.