Three Deaths Shake a Hardened City
By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 9, 2007
NEWARK -- Amid the anger, tears and heartache over the recent execution-style killings of three college-bound young people here in Newark, there is also a sense of resignation that the slayings are an all-too-familiar part of everyday life.
"Murder is the norm," said resident Don Franklin, 49, who coaches youth football. "Just because these kids are college kids, it's getting more attention."
On Saturday night, in a schoolyard riddled with gang graffiti, three students were lined up against a wall, forced to kneel and shot in the head. A fourth survived after being shot near the ear.
Early Sunday morning, a man was shot and killed on Smith Street. And on Tuesday, a confrontation between an armed man and an off-duty corrections officer left the officer with a bullet wound in his foot and the other man dead from gunshots.
But the schoolyard killings have caused an outcry about the homicide rate, which remains stubbornly high despite the election of Mayor Cory A. Booker, who took office asking to be judged by his ability to reduce crime.
Other cities, including Boston, Philadelphia and Orlando, have in recent years experienced a spike in slayings after years of falling homicide rates.
In Newark, there have been 60 homicides this year. Last year at this time, 63 people had been killed, a number that grew to 105 by year's end, the highest total since the crack epidemic of the mid-1990s.
Every other category of crime has dropped this year, police are quick to point out, and violent crime is down 16 percent. Still, 61 percent of those recently polled by the Newark Star-Ledger said crime is the city's biggest problem -- up from 27 percent 10 years ago -- and 48 percent said if they had the money, they would leave town.
The harrowing story of last weekend's shooting could suggest why.
Four friends -- Iofemi Hightower, 20; Dashon Harvey, 20; Natasha Aeriel, 19; and Natasha's brother Terrance Aeriel, 18 -- had been listening to music and joking around behind Mount Vernon School on Saturday night. Authorities said that around 11:30, they sensed menace from others in the schoolyard and text-messaged one another that it was time to go home.
Instead, soon Natasha Aeriel was shot near the ear. Amid apparent struggle, the others were lined up at gunpoint against a low wall, shot in the head and killed. Natasha is in fair condition under police guard at University Hospital, where by Tuesday she was able to give information to investigators.
Police say they believe the motive was robbery. Lupe Todd, a spokesman for the mayor, would not comment after news reports suggested an arrest in the case was imminent.
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."
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