Newark, N.J. – Mourners shed tears and showed a resolve to end the city’s deadly violence at funeral services Saturday for three friends who were lined up against a schoolyard wall and killed by shots to the head.
Mayor Cory Booker was interrupted by applause at Metropolitan Baptist Church as he urged residents to help fight the city’s alarming murder rate.
“We need to raise our children,” he said at the service for Dashon Harvey, 20.
Harvey, an aspiring fashion model and social work major at Delaware State University, was remembered by classmates as good-hearted and always smiling.
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 past decade to a total of 106 last year.
Three people have been arrested in 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 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.”
