N.J. city buries 3 shooting victims
Newark Buries 3 College Friends Killed in Schoolyard Shooting
DAVID PORTER
AP News
Aug 11, 2007 21:08 EDT
Mayor Cory A. Booker pounded a podium, yelling "Enough is enough!" at a funeral Saturday for one of three college students forced against a schoolyard wall and killed with shots to the head.
Mourners at services for Dashon Harvey and the other victims resolved to use the slayings as motivation to curb the alarming violent crime rate in New Jersey's largest city.
"We need to raise our children," Booker said to applause at Metropolitan Baptist Church at the service for Harvey, 20.
Harvey, an aspiring fashion model and social work major at Delaware State University, was remembered by his classmates as goodhearted and always wearing a smile.
The slayings late on Aug. 4, plus an unrelated homicide soon afterward, brought Newark's murder total for the year to 60, almost equal to the 63 that had taken place in the same period a year earlier. The city's murder rate has increased 50 percent in the last decade to a total of 106 last year.
Three people have been arrested in connection with the three slayings, two of them juveniles, and police on Saturday announced a warrant for a fourth person.
Saturday was a day of mourning in the city, with funerals for Harvey, 18-year-old Terrance Aeriel and 20-year-old Iofemi Hightower.
The friends were shot on the playground of an elementary school last weekend during an apparent robbery attempt. All three were ordered to kneel in front of a wall, then shot in the back of the head, authorities have said. Terrance Aeriel's sister, Natasha Aeriel, was shot in the head near a set of bleachers but survived and helped investigators identify a suspect.
Hightower was "a beautiful person inside and out" who had tried to elevate herself "beyond what we all see around us," her aunt, Gloria Hightower, said at a service at Grace Temple Baptist Church. Hightower was working two jobs this summer and was in the process of enrolling at Delaware State.
The other three already were students there, and scores of Delaware State students attended the funerals.
All four victims had been active in their high school marching bands in Newark. Harvey was a drum major at Malcolm X. Shabazz High School.
"If 'Shawny' were here today, he'd say 'Celebrate!' He was a drum major, and he is just playing somewhere else now," the Rev. David Jefferson Sr. said.
Terrance Aeriel, known as T.J., was ordained as a minister at the age of 13 in 2002. He was remembered for his devotion to the church and his work with youth organizations.
"As I grew up with him, he never changed," friend Victoria Irving said at Aeriel's funeral at New Hope Baptist Church. "He stayed the same. He always had God on his mind. That's what I loved about him. And he was a great help to me."
Source: AP News

