HOW JERSEY TWO KILLERS BECAME THE ... DEVILS
The kin of one fiend puts blame on the other
David Anderson and Francine Graham mercilessly took the lives of three innocent people and a Jersey City cop.
Decades before he was the anti-Semitic assassin who opened fire in a Jersey City kosher supermarket with his gun-toting girlfriend, David Anderson taught his niece how to drive.
“Uncle David was not a hateful person growing up. He never tried to hit us. He was the cool one,” Alliah Smith, 35, said in an exclusive interview with the Daily News.
“He came from a very strict, very religious family. They gave everything to the church. They’d eat just beans for dinner. But David was down to earth back then,” she said.
“To see what he did, it’s unbelievable to me. It’s so horrible and wrong. I’ve cried so much,” she said. “He wasn’t always a monster.”
Chilling video shows the 47-year-old killer and his girlfriend, Francine Graham, 50, exiting their stolen rental van Tuesday and stalking into the JC Kosher Supermarket with guns raised.
Three innocent people lost their lives inside: Mindy Ferencz, 31, who ran the shop with her husband; Brooklyn rabbinical student Moshe Deutsch, 24, and store employee Douglas Rodriguez, 49.
Just before unleashing mayhem inside the market, the duo encountered Jersey
City Detective Joseph Seals at a nearby cemetery. Seals was investigating the murder of a livery driver in Bayonne, N.J., on Dec. 7 — a crime cops now believe the couple committed. Seals was gunned down in cold blood. Anderson and Graham left him to die, and headed for the kosher market.
They then tried to kill many more cops while making their final stand in the supermarket, blasting away with an arsenal that included an AR-15-style assault rifle and a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun bought by Graham last year, authorities said.
The domestic terrorist duo died in the firefight. Officials found a “rambling” manifesto and a live pipe bomb in the van. They say the location was targeted.
The rampage stunned Graham’s family living in Manhattan.
Graham was a certified nursing aide dedicated to helping people when she first met Anderson about three years ago, her youngest brother told The News.
“He seemed sketchy, but we didn’t believe he was capable of doing something like this,” the brother, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear for his family’s safety, said.
He said Anderson introduced himself as “Duwarta” and claimed to be a handyman.
“She fell in love with him,” he said of his sister. “And she followed him. Through cosaid ercion and conditioning, he must have gotten to her.”
The grief-stricken sibling his sister plunged into a downward spiral as her life collided with Anderson. She lost her job, and “financial difficulties” led to the foreclosure on her condominium in Elizabeth, N.J., last year, he said.
According to state records, the job she got at Terence Cardinal Cooke Health Care Center at Fifth Ave. and 105th St. back in 1999 ended with “termination” in January 2017.
“He took my sister’s life,” the brother said bitterly about Anderson. “You don’t turn into a mass murderer at 50.”
Smith, Anderson’s niece, said her now-notorious uncle grew up in a house on Astor
Place in Jersey City and lost his mom when he was young. He later lived with her family in the late ’90s.
After that, he had a fallingout with his older brother William Anderson — the stepdad who raised Smith since she was 4.
“My dad pushed him to gain some stability. He didn’t like that my dad was a corrections officer. He had a lot of disdain for him. I really think that’s where his dislike for cops started,” Smith said.
“The family kind of disowned him,” Smith said. “He had no one.”
William Anderson, 52, served four years in the Navy, following in the footsteps of the brothers’ Army Korean War vet dad. He later got a job with the New Jersey Department of Corrections and is now warden of the Essex County Correctional Facility.
David, meanwhile, served as fuel and electrical system repairer in the Army from September 1999 to September 2002 and in the New Jersey Army National Guard from October 2002 to June 2003.
He struggled after that, working odd construction jobs, experiencing homelessness and bouncing in and out of jail with five arrests.
Hudson County, N.J., jail records show he was in custody from May 2003 to April 2004 on a weapons conviction and then again from November 2007 to December 2008 for another weapons possession case.
He was arrested in Ohio in 2009 after he allegedly got violent with a girlfriend and threatened to kill her.
The woman said Anderson choked her, punched a hole in a closet door and squeezed her face, saying, “I’m gonna kill you. I feel like killing you,” a Kent, Ohio, police report obtained by The News said. He was convicted of criminal mischief.
A wannabe musician, Anderson later made a failed attempt at a rap career after he was arrested again in Ohio in 2011 and returned to New Jersey.
A chilling 2014 track described his fantasy of killing Darren Wilson, the former Ferguson, Mo., officer who fatally shot Michael Brown in 2014.
Smith has no idea how David reportedly got involved with the Black Hebrew Israelite movement and knew nothing about his anti-Semitic posts online. She last saw him around the time her mom died in 2014 and then lost touch.
Graham’s brother said he and another sister tried to reach out and help their sibling who would become a cold-blooded killer, but she refused.
He again blamed Anderson for corrupting someone who previously dedicated her life to helping the sick and elderly.
“That man was evil,” he said. “My sister was coerced by that man. You just don’t turn evil at 50.”