VIOLENT SUNDAY
Two more people are dead after early-morning shooting, more injured with more shootings throughout the day »
TRENTON » The white tents have come to signify something in the capital city — another lost life.
Cops put up the tent Sunday to keep the body of a young man from the public view as two teenagers were gunned down in an early-morning shooting.
At least one vehicle windshield was shattered by gunfire as shell casings littered the 300 block of Centre Street, which was the center of a sprawling crime scene.
According to police sources, the double homicide happened around 7:30 a.m.
The Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office identified the victims as William Irrizarry and Julius Vargas, both 18. Irrizarry was 15 days out from his 19th birthday.
The killings marked the 23rd and 24th homicides in the capital city this year, keeping Trenton on pace for an ignominious benchmark.
City and county officials met following the Sunday morning homicides and announced they’re deploying more officers — they didn’t say how many — to crime hotspots throughout Trenton.
“Every homicide is one too many,” Mayor Reed Gusciora, who didn’t return multiple phone calls seeking comment, said in a statement. “While Trenton is just one of several cities struggling with violent crime as COVID-19 erodes economic opportunity across the country, we’re not content to be just another statistic.”
Officers from the county prosecutor’s and sheriff’s offices will supplement Trenton officers, the mayor’s office said.
In addition, TPD Director Sheilah Coley asked New Jersey State Police to step up patrols of the capital city.
Coley hopes to double the number of TPD police recruits by adding another police academy session this year. The next class starts Sept. 14.
While officials hope that a $4.5 million State Police real-time crime center, set for completion in the next year, helps reduce the gunplay, community activists have been sounding the alarm for months that Trenton could face recordshattering bloodshed in 2020.
The previous record for murders was 37, set in 2013.
Under pressure to solve the gunplay, Coley — replicating a move made by former city police bosses — disbanded the highly controversial street crimes unit, shifting those officers over to patrol.
Critics have suggested getting rid of the unit hasn’t worked in the past and drew a link between the dissolution of the specialized group and a rise in violent crime.
Coley said this week that city cops are hard up to prevent the killings in the capital city, at least 11 which involved personal disputes.
The motive for Sunday’s double slaying was still unknown.
“We are doing everything we can with the resources we have,” Coley said at Thursday’s council meeting.
Coley has said her department made 2,284 arrests this year and identified 47 “main players” involved with “90 percent” of the crime in the city.
Cops arrested more than a dozen notorious scofflaws, she said, but another 34 people were released from incarceration because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Gusciora said in a text message Sunday morning that he was headed out to the scene.
He did not provide additional information on the slayings, saying everything was under investigation.
It was an obvious answer to what has become an alltoo-familiar scene in Trenton this year.
The carnage has gotten so bad that council president Kathy McBride sponsored an ordinance earlier this year calling for city officials to ensure the bodies of those slain are covered from public view.
She said many residents, including children, were traumatized after seeing the lifeless body of Dontae Barnes, 37, sprawled out on
Oakland Street in June.
Barnes, who had just been released from prison, was the 15th murder of the year, a heinous snuffing out of life in which the killers allegedly continued shooting the victim while he lay lifeless on the ground.
McBride petitioned the Mercer County Prosecutor’s to buy white tents to shield murder victims’ bodies from public view.
She said the victims deserved decency as the community attempts to protect kids from the harsh realities on the capital city streets.
Trenton Police has struggled to control the surging violence in 2020, after two straight years with fewer than 20 murders.
A day after Barnes was killed, a 12-year-old girl had to have 12 inches of her intestines removed during emergency surgery after she was wounded in a triple shooting while playing at Roberto Clemente Park.
The assailant was reportedly targeting a group of people gambling in a nearby alleyway when the little girl got caught in the crossfire, hearkening back to when then-7-year-old Tajahnique Lee, riding her bike through the WilsonHaverstick housing project, was struck in the face by a stray bullet in March 2006.
Coley called on the community to help crack down on the gun-toters.
“If two young girls can’t galvanize this community, then we have no hope and nothing else will,” she said at the June 3 news conference. “We can still take this city back.”
Some have criticized Coley’s efforts and responses to the piling-up bodies.
Community activist Darren “Freedom” Green said he disagreed with the police director’s assessment that the police are essentially powerless to prevent the vendetta killings.
“You gotta have a comprehensive plan,” he said. “It’s almost like we sitting, waiting and watching. We’ve got to get in these communities. This stuff isn’t random; it’s strategic. [The factions] are internally at war.”
He stressed that police need to be in the neighborhoods more building relationships with residents who are instrumental in providing information to help solve the homicides.
Green floated the idea of having “block captains” who help cops keep watch over the neighborhoods.
“We have to identify [the killers] and work with the director and the police to shut them down. Nobody wants to live like this. Nobody wants to wake up at 8 a.m. and see another murder outside their door,” he said.
“Somebody knows who did it and somebody knows why. This isn’t Philadelphia. This isn’t New York. It’s 7.5 square miles. It’s too small to be this dysfunctional. I am not blaming anyone, but I am challenging everyone that we need to do better.”
Later in the day, two cars were stuck and another person underwent emergency surgery after getting shot four times in the abdomen in a separate shooting, sources said.
At least seven shots were fired, but no one injured, in a third shooting on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.