Camden Woman Fights for Right to See Husband After Life-Threatening Shooting
Tahj Bolden and Anita Acevedo on their S. 10th Street front porch in Camden on July 19, 2025 the morning after his discharge from the hospital.. Photo by April Saul
BY APRIL SAUL | For AC JosepH Media
CAMDEN — At noon on June 29, a sultry, sweltering Sunday, Anita Acevedo sat weeping on a bench outside Cooper University Hospital, a plush toy gorilla in her lap.
Sixty hours earlier, first responders rushed her husband Tahj Bolden to Cooper with two gunshot wounds. She had been prohibited from seeing him and had been forced by Cooper security officers to leave the air-conditioned lobby and move to a nearby bench in the heat.
Three Camden County sheriff’s officers approached Acevedo. “They’re adamant,” one said of hospital security, “that they want me to tell you to leave!…I don’t think you should have to go anywhere, it’s ridiculous to me.”
Bolden, 31, was shot just before midnight on June 26 around the corner from the family’s Whitman Park home on South 10th street after a barbecue. Acevedo was told that after Bolden had been rushed to Cooper, he said he didn’t want any family members to see him, then was sedated.
It was that statement, Acevedo was told, that made hospital personnel ban her from her husband’s bedside. Acevedo does not believe it explains why she had also been barred at various times from sitting in the hospital lobby and on benches on hospital grounds and using the Cooper bathrooms or cafeteria.
She said she had also been refused any information on her husband’s condition except that he was “critical.”
Cooper public relations manager Wendy Marano said that because of HIPAA privacy laws, she could not discuss Bolden’s particular case. She said that the hospital’s patient relations team “is in direct contact with the wife and is handling the situation directly with her.” Marano added that, “In all cases as a general rule, we always defer to the patient’s stated wishes until otherwise changed.”
The sheriff’s officer, who declined to be identified, told Acevedo that hospital personnel had the right to ask her to leave Cooper grounds.
“But it’s an abuse of that right, because that right is supposed to be for people causing a disturbance, not sitting on a bench, especially sitting on a bench waiting to find out the health of their husband,” he said to her. The officers helped the 37-year old mother of five move to another location where they told her she would be less visible.
Acevedo said after Bolden was shot, she was told she would be able to see him the following day.
The next morning, after spending the night in a car outside Cooper, she said she was asked at the hospital “to go to the police department and get cleared because of the severity of the case and the gunshot wound. I showed them the marriage license, our birth certificates, social security, everything.”
Acevedo said the police then called Cooper to confirm her identity to hospital personnel. Camden County spokesperson Dan Keashen said that because of law enforcement’s access to an extensive database, police often verify identities for the hospital.
“They still wouldn’t let me go up,” she said. “They said he didn’t have an emergency contact on his documentation so even if something happened, they wouldn’t call me.”
She said she explained to Cooper staff that Bolden had medical records at Virtua Hospital, where she was his emergency contact. She added that when she had been a Cooper patient recently, Bolden had been her emergency contact.
Acevedo said for the first three days he was there, Cooper staff continued to refer to Bolden as an “unidentified gunshot victim” despite her protests.
Acevedo said she believed the kindness of two Cooper Hospital security guards led her to finally see her husband on the evening of June 29. She said she received cafeteria vouchers and apologies from several Cooper employees, with some at the hospital acknowledging that as Bolden’s next of kin, she had the right to be apprised of his condition.
Acevedo said that it was the way Cooper allegedly handled the 2011 shooting death of her brother, Johnathan Acevedo, that made her “lose all trust in Cooper as a hospital.” She said he was declared brain-dead and after her mother decided not to donate his organs, her brother was taken off life support when they were out of the room.
“We never got the chance to sit there with him,” she said. “He died by himself.”
Acevedo and Bolden had been together for two years; they married in April 2025. Bolden had three children of his own and fell hard for Acevedo.
During one of the couple’s first encounters, Bolden got a call from his mother. “He said, ‘I’m talking to my future right now, I gotta call you back,’” Acevedo recalled.
“Two years I’ve done everything with that man,” she said. “We eat off the same plate, we take a shower together, any one-man job we make a two-man job…we cook together, we clean together, we do everything together.”
The shooting remained under investigation as of July 22 by the Camden County police, and no arrests have been made.
Acevedo bought the stuffed animal because she had once joked to Bolden, “’You’re like a little gorilla, short and stocky.’”
She had tried to send it upstairs to his room while she was barred from visiting, she said, “but they said no.”
After the evening of June 29, Acevedo was allowed to spend time with Bolden in his room at Cooper. On one of the few nights at the facility, she said she was sent down to the lobby, where at one point, a security officer chastised her for falling asleep and warned her that the hospital was not a homeless shelter.
The gorilla made it to the windowsill of Bolden’s hospital room, with balloons inscribed with messages of comfort and healing from his loved ones.
After her husband had undergone five surgeries and spent 22 days at the hospital, Acevedo was instructed on how to drain and clean the tubes connected to the stent placed in Bolden’s liver, and he was discharged from Cooper in her care.
On his first morning back home on July 19, Bolden and Acevedo were sitting on the front porch, a stone’s throw from where he was shot. Bolden, unable to walk without assistance, spoke in a whisper. The couple said they hope to use crime victims’ assistance funds to find another place to live as soon as possible.
Acevedo was still upset about the way she felt she was treated at the hospital.
“I almost lost my husband,” she said, “and lost my pride and dignity in the process, just for caring about him.”
Bolden explained that when he was admitted to Cooper, he said he didn’t want any family members around him “because I thought I was going to die. And I didn’t want them to see me like that.”
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On June 29, 2025, Anita Acevedo sits outside Cooper University Hospital after being asked to leave the lobby while her husband is in the ICU with bullet wounds. Photo by April Saul
2. Tahj Bolden and Anita Acevedo on their S. 10th Street front porch in Camden on July 19, 2025 the morning after his discharge from the hospital.. Photo by April Saul
3. The intersection of Mechanic and S. 10th Streets in Camden where Tahj Bolden was shot on June 26, 2025. Photo by April Saul
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