Man found hanging at the Hampton City Jail was “family man” charged in heroin-fueled robbery spree

A man who was found dead Wednesday afternoon in the Hampton City Jail was arrested the night before in a spree of armed robberies in the city.

Basim Ibn Muhammad, 44 — found hanging in his cell in an apparent suicide — was charged Tuesday night in connection with five 7-Eleven stick-ups since late June.

But his wife said Muhammad was a “family man” who held a full-time job as a home remodeling contractor after the family moved to Hampton from Richmond two months ago. Recent health issues in the family, she said, likely re-triggered her husband’s long-term battle with heroin addiction.

According to court documents, Muhammad was pulled over Tuesday on a traffic stop. Officers said they found a handgun in the glovebox and “suspected heroin” inside a pack of cigarettes in the center console.

Under questioning from Hampton detectives, Muhammad confessed to robbing the stores to feed his addiction, a criminal complaint said. He also admitted paying “$150 and heroin” to buy the gun a few months ago in Richmond.

He was charged with robbing the store clerks at gunpoint at a series of 7-Elven stores in Hampton — on Fox Hill Road on June 25; on East Pembroke Avenue on July 4; on Woodland Road on July 10; again on East Pembroke on July 12; and on Old Buckroe Road on July 19.

In each of the robberies, the criminal complaint alleged, Muhammad requested a pack of Newport 100s cigarettes, then pulled his gun when the clerks turned their backs. He garnered a total of $1,888 in the robberies, the complaint said.

Each of the stick-ups was punishable by up to 20 years in prison, in addition to decades more on 13 gun and drug counts. Muhammad also had time hanging over his head from a robbery he had already served time on years ago, his wife said.

A jail log shows that police took Muhammad to the Sheriff’s Office lock-up just after 11 p.m. Tuesday, and he was moved to the City Jail at 2 a.m. Wednesday.

Hampton Sheriff’s Major Steven Rich, the acting undersheriff, said Muhammad was found hanging in his jail cell about 4 that afternoon — 11 minutes after a sheriff’s deputy had last seen him alive during a security round at 3:49 p.m.

Rich said a sheriff’s deputy was beginning to deliver dinner trays to inmates when he turned a corner, saw Muhammad, then called an “all available” — asking all free deputies to respond.

Muhammad was low to the floor, hanging by a bed sheet attached to a vent grate on the rear wall of his cell, Rich said. The inmate was alone in the four-bunk cell because of quarantine rules for new inmates due to the pandemic.

Sheriff’s deputies, including a lieutenant, and two nurses immediately began CPR, and they continued until Hampton medics arrived and took over a few minutes later.

Since there were some signs of life, Rich said, everyone had hope he could be revived, adding that a defibrillator was also used.

But Muhammad was pronounced dead by medics at 4:25 p.m., Sheriff’s Office spokesman Lieut. Alonzo Cherry said, saying “there are no indications of foul play.”

Muhammad’s wife, Jennifer Herndon Muhammad, said officers came to the family’s Buckroe area home about 5:30 p.m. to deliver the news.

“They said that when they found him, he still had a faint pulse,” she said at the Bridgeport Apartments. “And they did the shock treatment trying to bring him back. But it was just too late.”

She said she has many pictures and videos of her husband with the couple’s 3-year-old daughter, Jaliyah, who would run and greet him when he got home, “and he’d scoop her up in his arms and kiss her.”

“That’s why I can’t understand why he chose to do what he did, because he adored that little girl,” she said. “It’s a big shock for me that he chose the route that he didHe never gave any signs or anything that he was going to harm himself.”

She said her husband was making $18 an hour as a full-time contractor and had two teenage stepsons aside from his toddler daughter.

But she said that perhaps “realizing that he was pretty much going to be in there for the rest of his life wasn’t something that he could take.”

Recent health setbacks in the family — involving his wife, mother and one of her stepsons — likely caused him to begin reusing heroin, she said. “That took a toll,” she said. “When he loves you, he loves hard.”

When Muhammad called her from the police station after his arrest Tuesday night, she said, he “sounded sad” and “admitted everything to me.”

“He just expressed to me how much he loved me, that he loved his daughter and his kids, and told me everything was going to be all right,” she said. “I told him, ‘Just hang on, and give me a chance to see what I can do to help you.”’

Muhammad told her that getting locked up might be his best chance to get off the heroin, she said, “because we knew he would be in there for a while.”

“I just don’t want people to get the wrong impression about my husband, and just think that he’s this cold-hearted criminal,” she said of the man she’s been with for five years. “Because he’s really not. He’s a great and loving, caring, genuine person.

“It’s a hurt feeling because we actually came out here (to Hampton from Richmond) for a new beginning,” she added. “And now my whole world is falling apart in a matter of seconds.”

As she played in front of the family’s home Friday, 3-year-old Jaliyah wore one of her father’s favorites, a camouflage fishing-style hat, saying “Daddy” periodically.

“She’s been going to the door every day,” Jennifer Muhammad said. “She keeps looking for him to pull up.”

Peter Dujardin, 757-247-4749, pdujardin@dailypress.com