The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

A Heinous Crime and a Mystery Motive

Posted on | February 13, 2026 | No Comments

This is Nafiah Ikram or, rather, I should say this was Nafiah Ikram.

Not that she’s dead, but she doesn’t look like that any more. On the evening of March 17, Nafiah was 21 years old and had just gotten home from working a shift at CVS as a pharmacy technician. She was helping her mother bring some items in from the car when a man ran out of the bushes near a neighbor’s house, and threw a cup of sulfuric acid onto Nafiah’s face. Take my word for it, her injuries were horrific.

For nearly five years, Nafiah’s attacker escaped justice. The mystery was why anyone would want to harm Nafiah, who was attending Hofstra University part-time while working full-time at CVS. She had no known enemies, and yet, as her father told reporters, it was not a random attack:

Her father, Sheikh Ikram, 50, said Nafiah was targeted on her way home from work.
“No it’s not a random attack, it’s a planned attack,” Ikram told The Post Wednesday night.
“If it was a random attack, why did … they waited for her to come home,” Ikram said, adding the suspect could have attacked his wife, who was outside moments earlier.

This week, police arrested a Brooklyn man, Terrell Campbell:

A flower deliveryman who allegedly threw acid on a woman and then wrote a song about it has been indicted five years later.
Terrell Campbell, 29, of Brooklyn, was indicted on Tuesday on first-degree assault charges for allegedly throwing acid on Nafiah Ikram while she was walking up her driveway in Elmont on Long Island in March 2021, leaving her with significant burns.
Campbell allegedly used sulfuric acid — a highly corrosive mineral acid found in lead-acid batteries — in the attack.
Surveillance video allegedly caught him running up on Ikram, throwing the acid and then running off.
After the attack, Campbell, an aspiring rapper, posted a song called Obsidian to YouTube under his rap name YungBasedPrince in 2023.
‘I’m discreet in the night, like a hitman assassin,’ he rapped. ‘Try to run up and have your face burning, acid.’
Nassau County prosecutors ridiculed his song in a statement, saying he ‘brazenly used the attack as material to further his rap career, publishing a video with lyrics that neatly fit the narrative of the crime.’
‘Terrell Campbell thought he was home free, but he could not have been more wrong,’ DA Anne T. Donnelly said in a statement. . . .
The red Nissan seen in the surveillance was a key piece of evidence, as community members told investigators he regularly drove the car under a family member’s name, as he had multiple violations on his license.
Cell phone evidence also showed he had searched ‘sulfuric acid remover,’ ‘sulfuric acid on car seat,’ and ‘can you recover from sulfuric acid burn.’
He also searched: ‘Acid attack Franklin Square Long Island,’ prosecutors said.
Campbell was arrested on February 9 by the Nassau County Police Department.
Campbell has pleaded not guilty to his charges. He faces up to 25 years in prison.
He is expected back in court on February 18.

Terrell Campbell

Perhaps you understand why I didn’t use my customary “Aspiring Rapper Update” headline, considering the grievousness of this crime.

Police and prosecutors have said nothing about Campbell’s motive. Maybe they have evidence or testimony they’re not sharing with the public, but why would this guy from Brooklyn commit such a heinous act against a complete stranger in Long Island, about 10 miles away?

My hunch is that the crucial clue is in that search that Campbell did for “Acid attack Franklin Square Long Island.” Why would he choose “Franklin Square” as the search term? Nafiah was attacked at her family’s home on Arlington Avenue in Elmont, about three-quarters of a mile away from Franklin Square. Well, there’s a CVS store at Franklin Square, and if Campbell had chosen Nafiah as his target after seeing her working at the Franklin Square CVS, he would have associated her with that location. We don’t know that to be the case, but it is a reasonable surmise, based on what we do know. To speculate further, it would seem that Campbell had been stalking Nafiah for some time prior to the attack, as he knew where she lived and was waiting to ambush her when she arrived home from work. But that still doesn’t give us the motive.

Here’s a scenario: For whatever reason, Campbell travels to Long Island and, during his visit stops into this CVS store where he sees Nafiah. Let’s just suppose he’s at the CVS to pick up a prescription, and Nafiah is working the register. Campbell tries to strike up a friendly conversation, but Nafiah doesn’t seem interested. Campbell gets his feelings hurts, becomes obsessed, and plots revenge against Nafiah.

That’s just a speculative scenario, among many possible explanations. So far we have no suggestion of Campbell’s motive — alleged motive, I hasten to add, since he has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent, etc. But the heinousness of this crime heightens the mystery of what could have motivated it. Human nature is such that we suppose an extraordinary crime must have an extraordinary motive, which is why so many wild theories still surround the JFK assassination. Surely, many people think, it cannot be that a pathetic misfit like Lee Harvey Oswald could have single-handedly accomplished the murder of the President of the United States. And in the attack against Nafiah Ikram, similarly, we can’t imagine that this beautiful young woman could be so horribly disfigured because an “aspiring rapper” from Brooklyn randomly chose her as his target so that he could write a rap lyric about his crime.

It’s crazy, but you know what they say about crazy people.



 

Category: Crime, New York

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