Slayings Stir Mix Of Resignation and Anger in Newark

Hightower and the Aeriels had been friends since elementary school in the Vailsburg section of Newark. They played together in the marching band at West Side High School and Terrance Aeriel, known as T.J., took Hightower to his prom last year, chauffeured by his sister. The group met Harvey more recently.

Two of them attended Delaware State University, and two planned to join them this fall.

The Aeriels lived in a white clapboard house, in a working-class neighborhood of homeowners.

But in Newark, where danger is block by block, nowhere seems far from burned and boarded-up buildings, weedy lots and half-standing fences, and what people here call "the war zones" of gangs.

The Aeriels' mother, Renee Tucker, has been rushing between visiting her daughter in the hospital and making funeral arrangements for her son.

"I will miss his smile, his funny face, the way he would make me laugh," she said on the phone of Terrance, who had been ordained as a minister.

India Lott, 18, a friend of Terrance's from his single semester last year at Delaware State, said she would tell him, "Newark is crazy!" He'd answer, "It's not worse than nowhere else."

"He had dreams of going to school and getting out of the ghetto," Ralpfe'ah Clark, 19, a close friend, said as she left a gilt-framed photo of them together, tied to red and silver balloons, at a memorial in the schoolyard where he had been killed. "He would say he can't stand to be around this environment," she said, recalling laughing loudly with Terrance in movie theaters, or stealing each other's shoes and then running barefoot into the street.

"They left this life in the worst way possible," said Clark, in tears.

But she, like half a dozen others interviewed for this article, could name other friends whose lives were cut off by gunfire, in a city where AK-47s, Glocks and .357 magnums are readily available for purchase or rent by the day.

"My friend was the 101st victim" of last year, said Ivette Calo, 34, who works for Verizon, adding that her neighbor was killed the year before that.

"I was a girl brought up in the street. Now I'm scared of the younger generation," she said.

In a dim apartment nearby, Kayron Harris, 17, Harvey's stepsister, said she has been full of fear since the killing of her stepbrother, a popular business major. "I don't go outside; I'm afraid to leave the house," she said.

James Harvey said that only a week before, he had picked up Dashon from college. Now he had just left a funeral home, where he had sat by his son's body and spoken his farewells.

"I said, 'Son, seeing you here is not what I imagined.' " Then he added, so painfully slowly that each word seemed like a separate sentence: "I will very much so miss him."