A Bloodbath in Newark, and Beyond

By BOB HERBERT

Published: August 11, 2007

NEWARK

Cory Booker seemed tired, beleaguered, bewildered.

The young mayor had been on the run with very little sleep for several days. Now, during a break in a private room at City Hall here, he leaned forward in his chair and said, “There is something going on in our country that people are not, for some reason, awake to.”

He then mentioned what he described as a “poignant” meeting he’d had with a top official of the F.B.I. “I asked him, ‘What is the solution to this problem?’ ” said Mr. Booker. “And he said to me, ‘It’s not law enforcement.’ ”

The mayor was talking about the violent crime that, like a dragon from some Medieval fairy tale, continues to devour the lives of young Americans, especially those in poor black and brown neighborhoods. This is a tale with no happy ending in sight.

Newark has been convulsed since last weekend when the dragons materialized late at night in the rundown playground behind a public school. A 19-year-old college student, Natasha Aeriel, was gravely wounded by a gunshot to the head. Her three companions, including her 18-year-old brother, Terrance, were then marched at gunpoint down a flight of stone steps and ordered to face a 6-foot-high concrete wall.

The youngsters were told to kneel and then were executed with shots to the back of the head in a tableau that seemed too insane to be real. Staring at the wall in daylight, under an extremely hot August sun, I found myself resisting the idea that this really happened, that three young people really died right there, like casualties in a war zone.

Forty years after the riots that wrecked this city, Newark is once again unnerved. People are calling for the resignation of a mayor who has been in office only a year. Others want the National Guard to start patrolling the streets, a stomach-turning suggestion to many who remember the riots.

The sheriff of Essex County, Armando Fontoura, lost it completely on Tuesday, loudly declaring, “I’m on the verge of telling my guys to suspend civil liberties and start frisking everybody.”

There’s a fever in the city. But the biggest mistake one could make in looking at the gratuitous slaughter of these young people (three arrests have been made and more are expected) is to view it as a problem peculiar to Newark.

A month ago, I was interviewing people in a playground outside an elementary school in Chicago, where a 13-year-old girl had been shot to death. She was just one of many. Nearly three dozen public school students in Chicago were slain over the past school year, most of them shot to death.

“It’s difficult out here,” said a woman who was watching her two young sons scamper around the playground where the 13-year-old had died. Her tone was every bit as weary and beleaguered as Cory Booker’s.

In Camden, N.J., on a Sunday morning in June, a 24-year-old nurse’s aide was killed in a burst of gunfire as she stood talking with a friend on a street corner. She was one of four young people killed in a four-day eruption of violence in Camden.

A teenager who lives in the city tried to explain to me what it was like to have a number of friends or relatives murdered: “You don’t exactly get used to it,” he said, “but you expect it.”

Philadelphia, across the Delaware River from Camden, is struggling with an even worse problem. As if signaling the start of an accelerated killing season, six people were murdered on the first day of summer. Philly’s homicide rate is on pace to break last year’s tally of 406.

As Senator Barack Obama said during a visit to a Chicago church last month, “From South-Central L.A., to Newark, New Jersey, there’s an epidemic of violence that is sickening the soul of this nation.”

More attention to this crisis of violence is needed, and more police resources, and more jobs, and better schools, and improved prison re-entry programs, and tighter gun controls. But more than anything else, a cultural change is needed.

The communities hardest hit are those in which too many parents have failed their children. The most effective anti-crime effort begins at home with parents (fathers, are you listening?) who raise their kids to know better than to point a gun at another human being and blow that person away for no good reason.

That’s the essential component. Without it, all other crime-fighting efforts are doomed, and thousands upon thousands of poor youngsters will continue to be denied their most basic civil right — the right to grow safely to adulthood.

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Two Crimes So Dark, Blurring the Images of Two Towns So Different

A memorial to the three people killed at a Newark playground.

By PETER APPLEBOME

Published: August 9, 2007

NEWARK

Instead of a memorial of bouquets and flowers on a landscaped suburban lawn, there are a dozen candles and as many balloons on the aluminum bleachers by the chain-link fence on an elementary school playground.

Instead of the hand-painted yard signs for flowers and sweet corn, there are the billboards offering up to $500 in a program to buy back guns and $2,000 for Crimestoppers tips.

Instead of stunned friends and neighbors who peer at the seared and boarded-up colonial on Sorghum Mill Drive as if contemplating an unknown world, there’s a stream of weary neighborhood folks and friends who venture down the alley to the playground where three young people were killed and a fourth was shot and left for dead on Saturday night. Three of the victims, including the survivor, were college students; the fourth was to begin classes this fall.

“We didn’t know them, but we’re just here to show some love,” said Ken Harris, a 20-year-old college student from the area, who stopped by the playground behind the Mount Vernon School here on Tuesday with another student, John Cavness. “It’s crazy. Young people doing this kind of thing to each other. We’re just here to show respect.”

There aren’t many places more different than the quiet suburban street in Connecticut where three members of the Petit family were murdered last month in a brutal home invasion and the mean streets of New Jersey’s largest city where four young people were shot execution-style on Saturday night.

But in an awful convergence, you could blur the two images and see almost exactly the same thing — good people who didn’t deserve to die, violence hard to comprehend, crimes so dark they took your breath away.

All murder is awful, but, in truth, not all murders are created equal. So in a town where violent death, tragically, is part of the backdrop of civic life, 17 officials led by Mayor Cory A. Booker showed up for a midday news conference on Wednesday, to speak about yet another murder.

The cameras were not there for the stated reason for the gathering — the arrest of Christopher Alexander, 21, who the police say shot and killed Quintez Waller, 23, on Sunday morning in what they described as a drug-related killing.

It was the 60th murder in Newark this year.

What makes some crimes go from horrors to symbols too glaring to ignore is not a simple matter.

In part, without doubt, it has something to do with the victims, but that’s not entirely simple, either. The Petits, who stood out as a successful and beloved family in the comfortable, largely white town of Cheshire, seemed utterly removed from the standard trajectory of violent crime.

But then the four young people shot in Newark stood out, too — students from good families who had no record of involvement in crime but who still couldn’t escape the violence around them.

In part, it’s a reflection of the extraordinary brutality of the crimes. Regardless of race or socioeconomics, there hasn’t been a crime in Connecticut in decades as brutal as the rape, kidnapping, murder and arson that played out on Sorghum Mill Drive. For all Newark’s history of crime, the execution-style shooting of four young people, in a largely middle-class enclave, left people reeling.

JOHN McCLAIN, whose grandniece, Iofemi Hightower, was one of the students killed, has been working as a Newark police chaplain for 40 years. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said. “This is like back in the days of Al Capone. This is what happens in Iraq or Afghanistan, not in an American city.”

And both crimes resonated so much because they seemed to carry a message. And that’s where the comparison breaks down.

The extraordinary savagery of the attack on the Petits led to a run on locks and security gear, not just in Cheshire, but far beyond. It was, people said, the most chilling reminder that no place is entirely safe from violent crime. In fact, it’s a worthy reminder. Just check out how common home invasions are on Long Island.

But no one, no matter how comfortable, has ever been given a pass from random malice. Being safety-conscious is always a good thing, but it’s not as if Cheshire and places like it are beset by widespread violent crime. What happened there is more a reflection of sickening, random evil than of something people should reasonably fear.

In Newark, the lesson is far more immediate, which is why Mr. Booker, who has staked his career on curbing violent crime here, has the look of a stricken man. Unlike in Cheshire, violent crime really is a daily, inescapable fact of life in Newark and in many other cities as well. Newark can talk about a renaissance all it wants, but the sad truth is the violence that wiped out three promising young lives on Saturday night, if not contained, will kill the city, too.

E-mail: peappl@nytimes.com

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