Thread: Feds Arrest 6th Suspect In N.J. Triple Murder Case

http://www.njsp.org/want/want.html

On the same day Newark buried three victims of last week's schoolyard slayings, authorities yesterday identified a 24-year-old Nicaraguan national with a record of robbery and weapons arrests as a "principal player" in the execution-style attack.

Godinez has lived on Midland Avenue and Manor Drive in Newark, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement records indicated he may have also been in the country illegally. Rodolfo Antonio Godinez Gomez entered the U.S. from Nicaragua on Oct. 24, 1992. He was ordered deported on May 5, 1993, but it isn't clear if he ever left the country, according to Essex County Sheriff Armando Fontura.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2007/0 ... r_3_n.html

Jose Lachira Carranza, a 28-year-old illegal immigrant from Peru

Jose Lachira Carranza, in court in Newark on Friday with a translator, pleaded not guilty ..................


Authorities said Carranza, a native of northern Peru and an illegal immigrant, is suspected of firing one or more of the fatal shots, though investigators remained uncertain whether the handgun was passed among the suspects.

He is charged with three counts of murder, one count of attempted murder, four counts of robbery, two weapons offenses and one count of conspiracy. His bail was set at $1 million.

He is married with a toddler daughter and works in demolition, according to his family.

Last month, a 31-count indictment was handed up accusing him of having sexual relations with a child, now 9, between 2003 and this year, according to court records. The specific charges are aggravated sexual assault, endangering the welfare of a child.

He also is facing charges in connection with an Oct. 21, 2006, bar fight in West Orange. He allegedly assaulted four patrons with a broken bottle and a chair at Huguito's, a small Peruvian restaurant and bar at White Street and Ashland Avenue.

http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2007/0 ... k_sla.html

- Fifteen-year-old male: The Newark teenager was arrested late Wednesday and pleaded not guilty in Essex County Family Court the next day to the same charges facing Carranza. He was being held in a youth detention center outside Essex County.

He lives in the Ivy Hill Park Apartments. Neighbors describe the boy as a popular and impressionable teenager. He attended Mount Vernon School, where the triple homicide took place.

Essex County Prosecutor Paula Dow said she would seek to try him as an adult.

His name and those of the other juvenile suspects are being withheld by authorities.

- Fifteen-year-old male: The teenager was taken into custody Friday afternoon in Morristown, where he lives in an apartment with his mother and her boyfriend. The family moved from Newark about two months ago.

He is expected to be arraigned tomorrow in Essex County Family Court on murder, felony murder, attempted murder and other counts.

The teen at one time lived in the Ivy Hill Park Apartments and attended the Mount Vernon School. Residents in the apartment complex said he was known as a troublemaker.

Tracking Newark shooting suspects on MySpace

by Jonathan Schuppe
Sunday August 19, 2007, 12:10 PM

Alexander Alfaro - 16-year-old

But the profile of his 16-year-old half-brother, Alexander Alfaro, was packed with clues. It listed the boy's nickname, "Smokey," and the names of dozens of friends who had sent him messages. It seemed to confirm reports that Alfaro is a member of a Latino street gang called MS-13: It included the name of an MS-13 clique (Guanacos Little Cycos Salvatruchos) and pictures of Alfaro throwing gang signs. The page also verified a crucial clue from early in the investigation: The boy had fled New Jersey.

Thursday, Peppers took an hour to build a bogus MySpace profile so he could try to strike up a conversation with Alfaro's friends. For Peppers, a deputized member of the U.S. Marshals Service task force for the New York-New Jersey region the past five years, it was an online version of the old gumshoe technique of finding friends and neighbors.

The detective spent the rest of Thursday trying to draw out the online friends. That night, the FBI in Washington, D.C., shared an informant's tip that the little brother was in in Virginia.

Peppers, remembering the MySpace page had listed friends from Virginia, asked the FBI to hold off until he and other New Jersey members of the task force could get there. Peppers, Daniel Potucek of the U.S. Marshals and Lydell James, the lead Newark homicide detective on the case, jumped in a car at 3 a.m. Friday.

Once they arrived in Virginia, the FBI told them the informant had seen Alfaro in Woodbridge, Va., hanging out with local members of MS-13. Alfaro was with another gang member from New Jersey, nicknamed "El Guapo."

"Guapo?" Peppers said he asked. "I know Guapo."

Peppers went back to the MySpace list of friends.

Peppers showed FBI agents El Guapo's pictures, which included some tattoos that matched the description provided by the informant.

By Friday night, Peppers and others tracked El Guapo to a Salvadoran restaurant in Woodbridge called Bongo's. El Guapo wouldn't tell them anything useful, so Peppers pressed his partners to raid the seven or eight houses they had been staking out.

As they were preparing for the raids, James got a tip from another informant: Godinez was in nearby Prince George's County, Md., where a black car was waiting to pick him up. The tipster said the car would leave at 2 a.m. Godinez would meet Alfaro and the two would head to Texas, then Mexico, then El Salvador, birthplace of MS-13.

At 1 a.m., investigators rushed to an apartment house in Oxon Hill, Md., about a 45-minute drive from Woodbridge, and raided a first-floor apartment with about 10 adults and teenagers inside, including several MS-13 members getting tattoos.

Godinez was in the crowd, but there was no sign of Alfaro.

Peppers and his partners called authorities in Woodbridge and told them to go ahead with their planned raid on a townhouse at Grist Mill Terrace. At around 1:45 a.m., they caught Alfaro walking out the back door. He didn't put up a fight.

Back in his Newark living room on Saturday, hours before he was finally able to sit down to his first hot meal in more than two days, Peppers said citizens should know Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Police Director Garry McCarthy and Police Chief Anthony Campos had let the fugitive team do whatever they needed to catch the two brothers.

"We'd do this for any citizen of Newark, not just those in a high-profile case," Peppers said. "This happens all the time. Hopefully, this shows that your police officers and public servants are really out there trying."


http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2007/0 ... ck_ne.html

Alleged Leader in N.J. Slayings Heads to Court Today

By Nikita Stewart
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 20, 2007; Page B02

A 24-year-old man believed to be the ringleader in the startling, execution-style killings of three college students in Newark will be arraigned today in Prince George's County District Court.

Rodolfo Godinez was arrested early Saturday in Oxon Hill after a fervent and extensive search by Newark and federal authorities that led to the arrest of his 16-year-old half brother later that day in Woodbridge. Early yesterday, Newark police arrested an 18-year-old man in Elizabeth, N.J.

The arrests of the three men marked the end of the search that has gripped the city of Newark and touched the country over the past two weeks. Presidential candidates have mentioned the homicides when talking about crime on the campaign trail.

"Now, the process of healing must take center stage and the prosecution of the case begins," Newark Mayor Cory A. Booker said in a statement yesterday. "This crime will not define our city."

On Aug. 4, siblings Natasha Aeriel, 19, and Terrance Aeriel, 18, and friends Dashon Harvey and Iofemi Hightower, both 20, were forced to kneel against a wall behind an elementary school and shot in the head. Natasha Aeriel survived. She, her brother and Harvey were students at Delaware State University, and Hightower planned to enroll there this fall.

Newark Police Director Garry McCarthy credited local law enforcement authorities in Maryland, Virginia and the District for helping with the arrests. Godinez was found in a fetid, three-bedroom apartment at Riverside Plaza apartments in Oxon Hill; his half brother was arrested about 20 minutes later in the basement of a townhouse at Grist Mill Terrace in Woodbridge.

According to the Star-Ledger of New Jersey, Newark police pieced the case together with the help of MySpace, the social networking Web site, where the 16-year-old suspect had a page. Information on his page revealed that he had left New Jersey and listed friends in Virginia.

Although the page has been removed, The Washington Post has a saved version of it, showing the young man in sunglasses and a bandanna making a gang sign. On the page, he claimed to be a member of Guanacos Little Cycos Salvatruchos, part of the Latino gang MS-13 with ties to Northern Virginia. He noted his occupation as "smoke Piff" and his income as "$250,000 and higher." The page showed that the "last login" was Aug. 5, the day after the killings.

A man who was at the Oxon Hill apartment at the time of Godinez's arrest said Godinez had talked about being a member of MS-13. Newark police and other authorities say, however, that they have found no gang link to the killings.

Detective Todd McClendon said in a news release that "although all of the suspects have now been apprehended this is still an active investigation and there are several details that still must continue to be withheld in order to ensure the integrity of the case."

The news release added that leads developed during the arrests of Godinez and the 16-year-old helped police capture Melvin Jovell of Elizabeth about 3 a.m. yesterday at a relative's home without incident.

Yesterday, the 16-year-old remained in a Prince William County jail, said Officer Erika Hernandez, a spokeswoman for county police. Hernandez said that she did not know when he would be arraigned but that Virginia law requires an arraignment within 10 days of an arrest.

Godinez, who is in the Prince George's Detention Center, will be in court today for extradition and bond hearings, said Ramon Korionoff, a spokesman for Prince George's State's Attorney Glenn F. Ivey.

Staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... eheadlines

New Jersey's Most Wanted

http://www.ancestorhunt.com/new-jersey-most-wanted.htm

Aug. 16, 2007, 7:22PM

New Jersey slayings stir anger

Victims followed their passions despite hard-luck neighborhood


By ERIN MCCLAM and DAVID PORTER
Associated Press


NEWARK, N.J. — The four college-age friends who were hanging out in a schoolyard late on a Saturday night were the type of children who make hometowns proud, especially hard-luck hometowns like this one.

They had passions — notably for music, which had brought most of them together. And they had ambitions: One of them was already an ordained minister, another about to be promoted in her job at a nursing home.

By almost any measure they were success stories. Three of them were home from Delaware State University, and another was set to enroll this fall.

But over several horrifying minutes, in the schoolyard of an elementary school, the four friends — their names were Natasha and Terrance Aeriel, Iofemi Hightower and Dashon Harvey — became something else entirely.

Three of them — Harvey and Hightower, both 20, and Terrance Aeriel, 18 — were forced to kneel in front of a wall and shot to death at close range. Natasha, Terrance's sister, was shot in the head and survived.

The three who died became murder victims Nos. 57, 58 and 59 of this year in Newark, which, despite the efforts of a mayor who won office last year promising to hoist the city out of a cauldron of crime, cannot seem to shake the violence.

A 28-year-old man, Jose Carranza, and a teenage boy were charged Thursday in the slayings, and prosecutors said they were seeking others involved.

As Natasha lay in a hospital recovering, helping investigators when her sedation allowed it, law enforcement groups and citizens assembled a $150,000 reward fund for information leading to arrests and indictments in the case.

Even in a place where violent crime has become ingrained in the rhythm of the city, the slayings have shaken people deeply.

In death, Harvey, Hightower and Terrance Aeriel have become symbols of outrage and hopelessness in Newark because of the brutal, cold-blooded way they were cut down and because of the promise they had shown.

They had represented the best of what this city sees in itself.


Typical college kids

The four were in many ways typical contemporary college kids. They loved listening to music, and all four played instruments. They were working jobs, earning money where they could. They had nicknames and MySpace profiles.

Two were siblings: Natasha Aeriel, 19, known as Tasha or "Moochie Baby," and Terrance, who went by T.J. Acquaintances described them as extremely close; the older sister had recently been teaching her younger brother to drive.

They lived with their mother in Irvington, a gritty town bordering Newark where shootings and assaults are common. Three people were gunned down last fall just a few blocks from the Aeriels' row house. Two more were shot dead nearby last month.


Carefree attitude
Still, they had a youthful sense of invulnerability, said Wayne Tucker, their stepfather.

"They had a carefree attitude," he said. "They'd just say, 'Let's hang out.' They didn't worry about anything. Me, I don't go out after night around here."

On her MySpace page, Tasha Aeriel posted dozens of pictures of herself and friends, flashing a beaming smile in many of them. In one, she wears outsized sunglasses and identifies herself as "JERZZZ GURLLL."

She listed as heroes the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. But it was her younger brother who took his Christian faith as a personal calling.

T.J. Aeriel, ordained a minister as a teenager, identified himself as a Pentecostal. Ken Bobien, a family friend, said he had preached a trial sermon at a church in nearby Hillside and blossomed at Higher Dimensions Worship Ministries in Bloomfield, west of the city.

A friend at Delaware State, Samantha Williams, 18, said T.J. spoke often of his faith and was not afraid of death.

She recalled the day she met him — he was singing in a hallway. The week before he was killed, T.J. Aeriel had called Williams, who was going through a difficult time, to reassure her, she said.

Williams said the Aeriels were best friends, alike in many ways. They knew their hometown was dangerous, she said, but did not let it hold them back.

"They weren't scared," Williams said. "They were never fearful of getting shot or having their lives taken away. I never heard them say that."

Natasha, who was majoring in biology, played alto saxophone with Delaware State's marching band, the Approaching Storm. Her brother played baritone; he had attended band camp in 2006 but dropped out. He planned to rejoin the group this fall.

Sister and brother were close enough that Natasha had chauffeured T.J. to a prom at West Side High School. His date was Iofemi Hightower, who had known the Aeriels since elementary school. She planned to join them at Delaware State in the fall.

Hightower was known as Sheena and played snare drum. She worked two jobs — at a company that provides food services to Continental Airlines at Newark Liberty International Airport, and at a nursing home in the suburbs, where she helped out part-time with her mother and was to be promoted soon to full time.

"She was one of the most beautiful ladies you'd ever want to meet," said John McClain, her great-uncle and a police chaplain. "Very smart, very intelligent. She wanted to be something in life."

At Delaware State, the Aeriels had met the gregarious Dashon Harvey. He worked in the admissions office, and changed his major last fall from psychology to social work. He was a snappy dresser, given to neckties and vests, and described himself on his MySpace page as a sometime runway model.

He was clearly at ease around people, and in front of a camera. He used the video-sharing site YouTube to promote himself for Mr. Junior in a Delaware State homecoming court competition earlier this year.

In a brief video, he appears holding a card in which he points like Uncle Sam, with the inscription "I Want Your Vote."

"What's up, everybody," Harvey says in the video. "I'm Dashon. I'm running for Mr. Junior for the 2007-2008 school year. Make sure you vote April 24." He concludes by flashing a thumbs-up.

"He was a pretty cool guy, a down-to-earth guy," said Addison Wright, a senior and member of Omega Psi Phi fraternity who met Harvey this summer. "He had a lot of ideas and goals for the school that he wanted to accomplish."

He was also Mr. Junior. He won the homecoming court competition.

At home in Newark, the four were fond of hanging out at Mount Vernon School, on the city's western edge. On the afternoon of Aug. 4, Hightower called her mother, Shalga, and said she would spend the night at Natasha's house.

"She was hanging out with her three best friends that night," Shalga Hightower said. She said her daughter's last words to her were, "I love you."

Renee Tucker, Natasha and T.J. Aeriel's mother, said the last time she saw them was about 10:30 that night, when they told her they were going around the corner to get something to eat.

"They said they were going to come right back to the house," she said.


Middle-class neighborhood
Mount Vernon School is in Ivy Hill, a middle-class neighborhood. Police patrol the area regularly and are a frequent presence in Ivy Hill Park, which sits across the street from the school and hosts jazz concerts in the summer.

What happened there on the night of Aug. 4 has been pieced together in Associated Press interviews with authorities, neighbors and friends of the victims. Many details were provided by Natasha Aeriel from her hospital bed.

After picking up Harvey, the group arrived at the playground about 11 p.m. The large swath of asphalt behind the school is shielded from the street by the school on one side and by houses and a high-rise apartment building on the other three.

As the group assembled on a low set of aluminum bleachers behind the school, they noticed a few other people in the playground. Soon, others filtered in.

Authorities said they do not know whether the new arrivals had been contacted by those who were already there. But Hightower, Harvey and the Aeriels became fearful and began text-messaging each other, apparently not wanting to reveal their concern.

The contents of the messages have not been released, and authorities have not given precise details of the moments that immediately followed the text messaging, but the confrontation soon took a deadly turn.

Investigators believe Hightower tried to fend off one of her attackers, as she was later discovered with knife wounds on her arms.

A neighbor heard a woman's voice shouting, "Don't do that! Don't do that!"

Then came the gunshots.

Tasha Aeriel took a bullet in the head, police said, leaving her slumped next to the bleachers. The other three were then marched down the steps and made to kneel in front of a wall.

When first responders arrived, they found Tasha clinging to life. Down the steps and to the right they found Hightower, T.J. and Harvey on the ground in front of the wall, each shot through the back of the head.

By Monday, a memorial had been set up on the bleachers and the three slain friends' MySpace pages were filled with tributes.

Five days after the shootings, Jose Carranza, considered the principal suspect, offered to surrender to Mayor Cory Booker in the presence of a well-known Newark attorney. The two came face to face at police headquarters.

"I don't think words can describe the level of emotion I feel about what these individuals have allegedly done to these families and what they have done to our community," Booker said.

A second suspect, a 15-year-old boy, was being held pending a detention hearing. Authorities were seeking to have him tried as an adult.

Carranza pleaded not guilty at an arraignment Friday.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/5061014.html

Manhunt nets last of 6 suspects

Arrest in Newark crime takes place in Elizabeth

Monday, August 20, 2007

BY TOM FEENEY AND RALPH R. ORTEGA
Star-Ledger Staff
A day after the far-flung search for two suspects in the Newark schoolyard shootings led police to Maryland and Virginia, detectives found the sixth and final suspect hiding just a few miles from the crime scene.

Detectives from the Newark Police Department and the Essex County Prosecutor's Office raided a home in Elizabeth at 3:45 a.m. yesterday and arrested 18-year-old Melvin Jovel, authorities said. He's being held on $2 million bail.

"Through collaboration with the Essex County Prosecutor's Office, the final suspect in this heinous crime has been arrested and the city is grateful," Mayor Cory Booker said yesterday. "Now the process of healing must take center stage and the prosecution of the case begins."

Jovel, described by people in the Newark neighborhood where he grew up as a short, chubby and quiet young man who was often picked on in school, is the sixth person arrested and charged in the Aug. 4 killing of three college students behind the Mount Vernon School. A fourth person was shot in the head but survived.

The other defendants include three juveniles and two men in their 20s. Though authorities have said the killings do not appear to be gang-related, there is evidence that most of the defendants identify with a Hispanic gang called MS-13.

A former classmate of Jovel's said he associated himself with the gang, and a MySpace page maintained by a Melvin Jovel of Newark had a picture of two forearms with gang tattoos.

Jovel's arrest capped a whirlwind 26 hours for the law enforcement agencies investigating the slayings.

Rodolfo Godinez, a 24-year-old Nicaraguan national investigators described as a "principal player" in the shootings, was arrested at 1 a.m. Saturday when detectives tracked him to a squalid apartment in Oxon Hill, Md.

"It was like a movie, man. It was like a movie. I've never seen anything like it," said a 30-year-old Guatemalan man who lives in the apartment with nine others and watched the police swoop in to grab Godinez. The man declined to give his name.

About 45 minutes later, Godinez's 16-year-old half brother, Alexander Alfaro, was taken into custody in an apartment in Woodbridge, Va., about 20 miles away. Authorities believe the two were planning to flee the United States to El Salvador.

"I went to see my son where they are keeping him," Gloria Godinez, the mother of both Godinez and Alfaro, said yesterday. "He is so frightened like a small child. I feel sick after seeing him that way."

The leads that pointed police to the Elizabeth house where Jovel was staying were developed during the arrests early Saturday in Virginia and Maryland, Newark police said in a release.

Jovel was raised in Newark and attended Mount Vernon School, Vailsburg Middle School and West Side High School, according to acquaintances. He was often seen in the neighborhood around the murder scene with Alfaro and one of the other juvenile defendants. The three were enthusiastic soccer players, an acquaintance said.

"He was often pushed around by other kids in school," said Sharlette Saunders, 17, who attended elementary and middle school with Jovel.

Jovel's family refused to discuss his arrest. A young woman who answered the phone at a house on Adams Avenue in Elizabeth identified herself as his sister but hung up before saying anything more. When a reporter arrived at the tan, two-story house, a man inside said in Spanish that the family would not comment on the arrest.

Newark police said it appears Jovel has had no criminal arrests as an adult. Sources said he turned 18 in June. No information was available about whether he had a record as a juvenile, nor was any information available about whether he is a U.S. citizen.

Authorities have said one of the other suspects in the killings is in the country illegally.

Jovel and the other five defendants stand accused of a crime so cold it has outraged a city that has seen more than its share of gun violence.

Dashon Harvey, 20; Iofemi Hightower, 20; and Terrance Aeriel, 18, were lined up against a wall behind Mount Vernon School and shot in the back of their heads. Terrance's sister, Natasha Aeriel, 19, was shot in the head during the attack but survived and has been able to provide investigators with information that has been helpful in tracking down the alleged perpetrators.

Three of the victims were students at Delaware State University, and the fourth, Hightower, planned to enroll there this fall. They were, by all accounts, young adults with promising futures.

At the Hightower home in Irvington, Iofemi's mother, Shalga, burst into tears and wailed after learning yesterday of Jovel's arrest. Rocking silently in a chair inside the house, she said she could not speak.

Iofemi's aunt, Sheila Hightower, said every time the police catch a suspect, the family relives the pain of losing Iofemi all over again.

"Why? Why would they do something like this?" she asked, sitting on the front porch of the family home. "They have families, too. I just want to know why."

Coby Hightower, one of Iofemi's cousins, said he feels some relief knowing everyone suspected of the crime is now in custody.

"It's definitely good to hear that they've been caught," he said, breaking into tears. "It still hurts because that's not bringing her back. All we have is memories left and all they can do is lock them up."

Investigators have said little about what they believe happened in the schoolyard that night. Officials from Newark and the Essex County Prosecutor's Office have scheduled a press conference for this morning to discuss the latest arrest, but the statement issued by the police department yesterday cautions some of those details will not be divulged.

"Although all of the suspects have now been apprehended, this is still an active investigation and there are several details that still must continue to be withheld in order to ensure the integrity of the case," the statement says.

The three defendants in custody before this weekend include Jose Lachira Carranza of Newark, a 28-year-old Peruvian who authorities said has been living in the U.S. illegally, and two juveniles whose names authorities have not released.

All six have been charged with the same offenses: three counts of murder, four counts of robbery, one count of attempted murder, two weapons offenses and one charge of conspiracy to commit robbery.

Jovel and Carranza are being held in the Essex County Jail. Godinez is being held in the jail in Prince George's County, Md. The three juveniles are being held in juvenile facilities.

Godinez and Alfaro are to be extradited to New Jersey, but it remains unclear when that will happen.

Now that the six are custody, the police will turn their attention to making sure the charges against them stick when they go to trial, Newark Police Director Garry McCarthy said.

"We will now remain focused as we continue our investigation to ensure that the prosecution has every available tool to ensure those arrested and charged will be held accountable for their actions to the fullest extent of the law," he said in the statement released by his department.

Staff writers Alexi Friedman, Melissa Castro, Katie Wang, Jeremy Cothran, Jonathan Schuppe, Jeffery C. Mays, Suleman Din and William Kleinknecht contributed to this report.

http://www.nj.com/news/ledger/index.ssf ... xml&coll=1

The mayor has already said their immigration status is not relevant You idiot voters in Newark get what you deserve