Two men facing charges for midday shooting
TRENTON » Two men face multiple charges after a shooting outside a capital city deli Thursday wounded a woman, police said.
Roger Carter-Evans, 20, and Deshawn Davis, 18, both of Trenton, are each charged with counts of attempted murder, aggravated assault and weapons offenses.
Carter-Evans, the alleged getaway driver, also faces four counts of complicity, according to police records.
State Police Detective Carlos Estevez made the arrests, but a State Police spokesman deferred comment to the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office, which provided a copy of the detective’s probable cause affidavit.
The men are accused of being the assailants who opened fire and struck a woman around 12:27 p.m., outside the Peter’s Pizza and Deli, which is attached to the Kingsbury Towers and across the street from the Mercer County criminal courthouse in the North Ward.
The woman was an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire of an alleged beef between the shooter Davis and one of two men who were targeted outside the deli, according to police records.
The two men, who identified themselves by their street names Blik ‘Em Down and Murskii, claimed in an interview with The Trentonian that the gunman was firing at them.
The men could not explain why they may have been targeted. Reached by phone Friday, Blik ‘Em Down said he did not recognize the names of the men who were allegedly behind the attempt on his and his friend’s life.
According to the probable cause affidavit, Davis admitted firing two shots at the men because one of them “physically assaulted” him in the past.
The shooters abandoned the silver Honda Civic, discovered in the parking lot of the Water’s Edge nursing home on the 500 block of Union Street.
Davis admitted leaving the gun inside the car, which was visible on the front passenger floorboard, according to the probable cause affidavit.
Officers recovered the semiautomatic handgun, believing it was used in the shooting, pending ballistics.
The woman was wounded in the knee and taken to Capital Health Regional Medical Center for treatment. She was expected to survive, police said.
Police interviewed the woman while she was being treated inside the deli, where she retreated from the gunfire.
She told cops that she met up with a friend outside the deli, at the corner of South Warren and Market streets.
She was talking to her friend when she saw two black men run by and heard at least one shot fired.
As she ran inside the deli, she realized she was wounded, Trenton Police Lt. Jason Kmiec said.
She provided a description of the suspects as two black men, one wearing a black top and the other rocking blue jeans, both with braids.
Both shooting suspects have short, closely cropped hair, according to the booking mugs.
The attempted murder charges related to the targeting of the two men, the affidavit says.
However, additional counts of aggravated assault, besides those for wounding the woman, were not filed against Davis and Carter-Evans for allegedly targeting Blik ‘Em Down and Murskii.
The men did not identify themselves as shooting victims when officers canvassed the neighborhood for witnesses, Kmiec said.
The men told a Trentonian photographer at the scene that they were shot at.
Apparently not shaken up, the men asked for their photograph to be taken, In it, they threw up hand signs often associated with neighborhood cliques and street gangs.
One of the men told The Trentonian that his father, Glenn Johnson, was gunned down in the city streets in 2011.
The men acted like dodging bullets wasn’t a big deal, saying they planned to smoke weed later in the night and head back out onto the hardscrabble capital city streets.
“We been out here all our lives. That’s nothing new,” one of the men said. “When you live out here, deep down inside, you gotta be strong. It’s like nobody got hit, so it’s nothing to worry about.”
“No fear,” Blik ‘Em Down said. “Spare none. Kill ‘em all. No fear lives here.”
Mayor Reed Gusciora expressed dismay over the men’s cavalier attitudes toward the rampant gunplay, which has already claimed 24 lives in Trenton in 2020, including 18-year-olds William Irrizarry and Julius Vargas.
“Unbelievable,” Gusciora said by text. “They think they are playing ‘Grand Theft Auto’ until they actually get shot.”