The True Face of Evil – Meeting the Newark Monsters – UPDATE

The four victims – L to R: Lofemi Hightower, Dashon Harvey, Terrance Aeriel, and Natasha Aeriel

Late last night, Newark, New Jersey police arrested a suspect for the execution-style murder of the three college students—Terrance, Aeriel, Dashon Harvey, and Lofemi Hightower–and the shooting of the fourth. Natasha Aeriel, the only one who lived through the massacre, was still lying in her hospital bed, hooked up to tubes and wires, when she picked the guy out of a photo lineup. The police also discovered a partial fingerprint on a beer bottle that they found near the scene.

The suspected killer is….

FIFTEEN YEARS OLD.

Why am I not surprised?

The police say the kid, if he did it, didn’t act alone. A murder warrant has been issued for a 31-year-old man name Jose Carranza, who has had three prior arrests and was awaiting trial for some crime—they didn’t say for what. (But I’m sure that will come out later today.)

The police also believe there were others involved in the murders. And, the motive for the killings was something tragically ordinary: robbery.

In other words, for some small amount of money or jewelry or whatever, three kids with promising futures were annihilated, the life of the fourth shattered.

This whole tragic mess reminds me of a conversation I had earlier this spring with an LAPD homicide detective. We were talking about how the people he’s arrested for killing other people almost never turned out to be the monsters of his imagination.

The subject came up as we discussed a particular young man who was on trial for murder—a small, scared-looking kid who was almost certainly responsible for the murder of another young man of about the shooter’s same age. “I look at him,” said the detective of the young killer, “and I think, if things had gone differently, he could be my little cousin.” By most accounts, the shooter wasn’t otherwise an awful kid at all. That was the hell of it. He was a boy who’d done a terrible, terrible, evil thing that ended one young man’s life and ruined the lives of others, including the shooter’s own.

“They’re never the monsters you think they’re going to be,” the detective said sadly.

“Never?” I asked.

Well, there was one time, he said, one particularly awful murder, where he thought this time, this fool is the real thing. A monster.

“But then when I arrested him, he wasn’t like I imagined at all.” The detective gave a weary shrug. “He was just this pathetic, messed-up guy.”

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UPDATE: Jose Carranza, the 28-year-old man wanted in connection with the murders has turned himself in. (He is not 31 as originally reported.) Carranza insisted on turning himself in only to Newark mayor, Cory Booker. Evidently he called Booker through his attorney and then drove to the Newark police station where the mayor was waiting outside, a homicide detective with him.

Carranza was out on bail, despite two criminal indictments against him. In April he was indicted on aggravated assault and weapons charges; and in July on 31 separate counts, including aggravated sexual assault of a child under 13 years old and endangering the welfare of a child he had a duty to supervise.

So why exactly was this creep so easily able to bail himself out while Genarlow Wilson has no bond set at all?

NOTE: Speaking of politicizing an issue, since the arrest, quite a number of blogs have been speculating rather unpleasantly and obsessively about Carranza’s immigration status.