Execution Style Shootings Kill Three, Injure Another
??7Online??: “Four college students shot execution style in Newark”:http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=local&id=5543596. The victims were college students and, reportedly, not involved in drugs or gangs. It’s frighteningly unclear why this occurred and who could have been responsible.
Shock and horror after the execution style shooting of four college students in Newark. Three of them attended Delaware State University. The fourth would have started classes there this Fall. They were found shot behind Mount Vernon School. One of the victims survived.
According to Newark police these students have never been in trouble with the law. Now, three of them are dead, the fourth one remains hospitalized.
“It’s just young people out here, armed with a gun, have no respect for human life and they kill one another at will for absolutely no reason at all. They just execute one another, that’s why we’re as frustrated as we are,” Essex County Sheriff Armando Fontoura said.
Late Saturday night, someone ordered three of the young people to line up against a wall behind the Mount Vernon Elementary school.
Neighbors heard a rapid burst of gunfire, and all three students were dead, each shot through the back of the head.
A fourth victim, a dozen yards away, was shot in the face. That woman, 19-year-old Natasha Aeriel, remains in fair condition, this morning, at University Hospital.
The ??New York Times??, also reporting on the shooting, provides some details about the victims’ lives: “Shooting of 4 College Friends Baffles Newark”:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/nyregion/06newark.html.
Ms. Hightower and the Aeriels grew up in the Vailsburg section of Newark, the neighborhood where the shootings took place. They attended West Side High School and were all members of its band. Ms. Aeriel played the saxophone; Mr. Aeriel, who used to spend hours each day reading the Bible, played the trombone; and Ms. Hightower, who always had a smile on her face, Ms. Tucker said, was the drum captain.
Ms. Aeriel, a junior in college, is pursuing a degree in psychology. She traveled to Newark for the weekend and planned to return to Delaware on Monday, to her job at a Subway shop in Dover. Mr. Aeriel, who was about to start his freshman year, planned to join Delaware State’s business-administration program, Ms. Tucker said.
Ms. Hightower’s cousin, Coby Hightower, 23, said Ms. Hightower was working two jobs — at a nursing home and at a food-services provider for Continental Airlines at Newark Liberty International Airport. She received her acceptance letter from Delaware State on Thursday. “She kept talking about working and going to school,” he said. “She was so excited.” Mr. Hightower, who wept as he stood outside the school on Mount Vernon Place, said his cousin was planning to share a room at Delaware State with Ms. Aeriel, her best friend.
Mayor Booker spoke with the victims’ families and offered his condolences.
“I’m very angry right now,” he said after the news conference. “We were on our way to having one of our best summers in years. Now, this incident casts a shadow over it.”