GHF
Member
An article on life in Newark in the New York Times. Note just how scared and unhelpful to the police the scared, unarmed people are.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/15/nyregion/15newark.html?pagewanted=all
NEWARK, Aug. 13 — The computer, its screen blank, sat on a table in the living room of Gloria Gomez’s apartment. Two blocks away, four promising young people had been shot, three fatally, and now Ms. Gomez’s two sons were being hunted by the authorities. She did not want to believe that her boys could have played a role in the killings, but she consented to turn on the computer, which one of her sons had brought into the house recently, while she was away visiting her native Nicaragua.
All six of the suspects in the killing of three young friends in Newark lived at one time or another in the Ivy Hill Park Apartments in the West Ward.
VideoMore Video » In seconds, the monitor filled with a blue-and-white wallpaper emblazoned with gang names, including that of MS-13, the notorious gang from El Salvador that has taken hold in a handful of cities across the United States. With a click, there was more: photographs of her 16-year-old drinking beer and Cognac, and making distinctive hand gestures signaling his allegiance to, or affection for, MS-13.
There was even a picture of him with two of the other teenagers the police have identified as suspects, seated in the bleachers of the very schoolyard where the killings later took place. Their fingers are splayed in V’s, thumb and pinky extended, in classic gang signs, and one is wearing across his face a bandana of blue and white, the colors of MS-13.
“Oh, my God,” Ms. Gomez said in Spanish.
Ms. Gomez, of course, is not alone in Newark in trying to come to terms with one of the shocking aspects of one of the city’s most gruesome crimes: that four of the six suspects were younger than the college students whom the police say they played some role in killing.
But in the 10 days since the shootings, with three people in custody and three others the subject of an intense search stretching down the East Coast to Virginia, a rough and disturbing portrait is taking shape of the mixed band of men and boys, of immigrant felons and local teenagers, who, whatever their real gang affiliations, certainly considered themselves a crew of their own.
An illegal immigrant from Peru, Jose Lachira Carranza, 28, possessed of a temper and a growing rap sheet, appears to have directed the group of a half-dozen or more — answered to like a boss. The group pulled off petty stickups in the elevators and parking lots of the sprawling Ivy Hill Park Apartments in the West Ward, according to interviews with relatives, friends and victims, who say the crew extorted people for quick cash, sometimes slipped through apartment doors cracked barely open by frightened residents.
Over the years, Mr. Carranza and Rodolfo Godinez, 24, who is Ms. Gomez’s other son, were each arrested at least twice on serious charges. But together they also carried off crimes under the radar, their victims say. On one occasion, they shook down Anglade Montel, a 33-year-old father of two babies, for $30, he said, adding that he was too terrified to ever call the police.
“I gave them the money,” Mr. Montel said. “I’m trying to protect my family.”
Another time, they surrounded Jason Toomer, 20, intending to give him the beating of his life, he said, mistakenly thinking he had stolen a cellphone from a member of the group.
Mr. Toomer said: “They drink, smoke and drink, and then come out here and harass and rob whoever they want. It’s real nasty, evil stuff, man.”
And a 31-year-old man, Luis Romero, said he turned over his new Nike sneakers to several members of the crew before being hit with a pistol on the back of the neck.
To date, the Newark authorities have offered no public portrait of the group they believe was responsible for the killings of Dashon Harvey, 20; Iofemi Hightower, 20; and Terrance Aeriel, 18. Their official statements have barely expanded beyond the simple, awful charges against the three already in custody: murder and robbery.
But one senior law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is at a critical stage, said that only one gun, a revolver, was used and that it was fired first by Mr. Carranza as he allegedly shot the only survivor, Natasha Aeriel, 19. One of the three suspects arrested so far, the official said, has told detectives that an 18-year-old who is still at large also fired the weapon.
Cellphones and jewelry were taken from the victims, according to the official, who said that Ms. Hightower and Ms. Aeriel, 19, who survived the shooting, were both slashed in the face with a knife or machete.
Motive remains one of the mysteries. From the first hours after the killings, there has been talk in the neighborhood that one victim could have angered the group with a real or perceived sexual advance on one of the teenagers. Some people have suggested that the victims, weeks from going off to college, were dancing in the schoolyard and did a move the crew mistook as a kind of gang provocation. Empty beer bottles were found at the scene, and could have fueled the violence.
The police have repeatedly emphasized that, so far, they do not believe the tragedy was gang-related. Garry F. McCarthy, Newark’s police director, noted that none of the suspects appear in gang databases, for the state, for Essex County, or for Newark
“At this point there is nothing in this case that indicates that this has to do with a gang angle, gang initiation, or gang violence,” Mr. McCarthy replied testily to a reporter’s inquiry about the apparent interest in gangs among the suspects. “The motivation seems to be a robbery. Whether or not a 15-year old kid claims he is an MS-13 member, there’s a difference between a gang member and a wannabe. It’s something unfortunately within this culture, because sometimes kids aspire to that.”
Many questions, then, remain. Most of the answers, of course, rest with the six people who, if the authorities are right, went from a relatively short, unremarkable career of troublemaking and midgrade terrorizing to one of this city’s more sickening spasms of violence late on a Saturday night in one of Newark’s safer neighborhoods.
Ivy Hill
The complex is known locally as a United Nations of sorts. The Ivy Hill Park Apartments, built in 1952, comprise 10 15-story buildings spread out over more than half a mile of one of Newark’s safer and most ethnically mixed neighborhoods. Its 10,000 residents — Eastern Europeans were the first to come — now include people from as many as 40 countries, according to the private complex’s managers.
There are Central Americans, Pakistanis, Indians. Most recently, single men from Honduras have been cramming into apartments and finding day work. The hallways of the different buildings are suffused with the smells of regional cooking. There are large green lawns and manicured flower beds. There is a synagogue, an Indian chapel, a dentist and a physician.
And a gym with a boxing ring, and a trainer who works at keeping neighborhood children out of trouble.
“It’s like a little city here, basically,” said Joseph Catalano, an assistant administrator of the complex. “There’s a lot of different cultures, and they all seem to get along.”
Several residents and officials at the complex said the place had come a long way from what they regarded as the true bad days of gang activity. They recalled that years ago, Ivy Hill residents were often afraid to approach their own apartments because of the gantlet of gang members lurking around the doorways of the buildings.
“It’s definitely a better area up here than the rest of Newark,” said Chris Yearty, who has lived next to the complex for nearly 30 years. Many people went there, he said, “to have a better life.”
But it is no shock that even a Newark housing success can have its dark corners. Some of the 10 buildings — chiefly the four along Manor Place — have been plagued by garbage and mischief, residents say. Drug dealing nearby is hardly uncommon. Parties could get out of hand. Cars were stolen. Lights were broken. Fists could fly, and weapons could be brandished.
All six of the suspects lived at one time or another in Ivy Hill, and they were considered among the complex’s most menacing elements. They hung out in Ivy Hill’s parking lot. They roamed its hallways with little resistance from security guards, some of them off-duty Newark police officers. They returned, even after they had been evicted.
And they lurked in a place known as “the bushes,” a garbage-strewn thicket of high weeds behind two of the buildings where they could set upon anyone who used a dirt path as a shortcut to a nearby shopping center, according to residents and several of those who said they had been victimized.
Jason Stonewall, 21, an Ivy Hill resident, said Mr. Carranza and his group seemed to prey on weak targets, like people who traveled alone or were small in stature.
Daniel Pena, 52, said the group had at times over the years forced him to stay indoors, marooned in his apartment.
“I fear going out on the streets,” Mr. Pena said. “If you have words with one, you have words with all of them.”
The Boys
The scene played out more than once: The group, led by one of the older men, would come to scoop up one of their youngest members, a 15-year-old boy who was known as something of a class clown at the Mount Vernon School close to the complex. Mr. Godinez, now 24, would scream at the younger boy — the son of his mother’s sister — to come along. They were looking to make trouble, and they wanted him to be part of it.
The boy, according to witnesses, would often end up in tears. But he would always go.
“He was not trouble like the rest,” said Mr. Toomer, the Ivy Hill resident. “When the crew would come around and start yelling at him, you would see a change. He would do whatever they wanted because he was so scared.”
The extent of the involvement of the four teenagers, whose names have been withheld by the authorities, in the killings, is a large, open question as the investigation continues. Three of them had long been close friends and were considered around the complex almost as one unit: Ms. Gomez’s nephew, who was the first to be arrested; her 16-year-old son, who remains at large; and another 15-year-old, who was arrested on Friday. The fourth, who the police believe is 18, has not been caught.
But interviews with friends and relatives, and an examination of the Web sites where several of the teenagers had their own pages, suggest that they were taken with the idea of gang culture, however real their actual ties.
The MySpace page of one of the 15-year-olds, in which he refers to himself as “$hotgun,” is a mix of harmless juvenile material (a nod to “The Simpsons,” for instance) and more sinister talk and symbols. He disparages the police; the page is littered with references to MS-13 and exchanges with others pledging a similar solidarity with the Central American gang. (“Blue and white till I die,” says one.)
MS-13, formed by El Salvadoran refugees in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, has quickly grown to become one of the nation’s most diverse, violent and enigmatic street gangs, according to law enforcement officials. The name, according to a Justice Department assessment, derives from the Spanish words “mara” (posse) and “Salvatrucha” (street-wise Salvadorans).
In an effort to expand its size and influence, MS-13 dropped its original requirement that only Salvadorans could belong, but is still run by former members of the Salvadoran militias, a fact that has given it a reputation for ferocious violence even by gang standards and a penchant for crimes involving machetes.
New Jersey police and prosecutors began to see signs of MS-13 locally in the late 1990s and, according to the Justice Department assessment, by 2005, the group was active in 36 municipalities in the state, including Newark. Prosecutors say the Los Angeles-based leaders of the two major factions, or “cliques” — the Normandy Locotes Salvatruches and the Leeward Locotes Salvatruches — have made frequent trips to New Jersey to recruit members and organize and plan various criminal endeavors.
Of course, as with many of the country’s other major gangs — the Bloods, for instance — there is great appeal for young people to want to be seen as affiliated with MS-13, to bond, to intimidate, to boast.
And that may well be the extent of this group’s connections.
Still, in one episode last month, said Luis Ramirez, a cousin of two of the members of the group, he saw one of the 15-year-olds and the 16-year-old, wearing masks, try to rob several young people on the complex parking lot. The assailants panicked, only managing to strike one of the intended victims in the head with a gun handle.
The descent into the group’s ad-hoc criminal enterprise seems to have happened rather quickly for the 15-year-old who often wound up crying. He had, within the last two years, won an award for being one of the most-improved students in school, and the mother of an eighth-grade classmate said he often waited to walk his little sister home.
Jonathan Ortiz, 14, a friend and classmate, said he saw the transformation happen all but in front of him.
“When his cousin started coming around, he started drinking and smoking,” Jonathan said. “He started carrying around weapons. He carried around a machete and a flat-head screwdriver.
“They hang around and claim they’re a gang.”
One friend and classmate of Ms. Gomez’s 16-year-old son said that he had been beaten during his initiation into the gang, and that he wanted to quit recently. She described him as not nearly as tough as he wanted to seem, and as something of a pawn of his older brother, Mr. Godinez. She said he had actively discouraged his younger cousin from becoming more involved.
“I personally think it’s Mr. Godinez who pressured him,” she wrote in an e-mail interview. “I know he was a very bad influence on his brother, which made me hate him.”
The Men
Mr. Godinez and Mr. Carranza were the group’s leaders, according to interviews. When they moved together as a group, no one ever so much as walked in front of Mr. Carranza, at 28 the oldest of the bunch.
“He’s just got this energy about him,” recalled Mr. Stonewall, the Ivy Hill resident.
Mr. Carranza, a father to one child, sometimes worked as a day laborer. He was known, according to those who worked with him, for regularly being hung over when he showed up for work in the morning at a day-laborer site in West Orange. He had been arrested for assault more than once, and was accused of raping a 5-year-old.
Mr. Godinez had a record, too, including a robbery outside a bar in which a man was stabbed in the back and critically wounded. Despite felony charges against both men, both had been released on bail or probation.
They always came back to Ivy Hill.
There was at least one person there who once held out hope for Mr. Godinez. Juan Rivas, who ran the boxing program in the complex’s gym, said Mr. Godinez, when he was 12, had showed promise and power. He weighed 120 pounds, trained five days a week, and won two of his first three competitive fights. “He suddenly stopped training because he said he needed to work,” Mr. Rivas recalled. “It’s sad because you can’t control these boys. I guess we lost with him.”
Mr. Godinez and the others, then, the emerging portrait of them indicates, wound up more committed to a different kind of violent routine.
With regularity, the older men, according to residents, would buy liquor or beer from the store adjacent to their favorite spot outside the apartment buildings. They would drink with the boys, and trouble often followed.
Mr. Montel, a repeat victim, said that twice, he was awakened at night by banging on his apartment door. Each time, including one night this summer, he looked out to see Mr. Godinez, with others behind him. He paid up: This time it was a $20 bill.
“They don’t work,” he said of Mr. Godinez and the others. “They just whip people to get money.”
But Mr. Montel would not call the police.
“Listen, when you call the police, you know what happens?” he asked. “They might try to kill you.”
Reporting was contributed by Annie Correal, John Eligon, Kareem Fahim, Andrew Jacobs, Daryl Khan, David Kocieniewski, Toby Lyles and Carolyn Wilder.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/15/nyregion/15newark.html?pagewanted=all
NEWARK, Aug. 13 — The computer, its screen blank, sat on a table in the living room of Gloria Gomez’s apartment. Two blocks away, four promising young people had been shot, three fatally, and now Ms. Gomez’s two sons were being hunted by the authorities. She did not want to believe that her boys could have played a role in the killings, but she consented to turn on the computer, which one of her sons had brought into the house recently, while she was away visiting her native Nicaragua.
All six of the suspects in the killing of three young friends in Newark lived at one time or another in the Ivy Hill Park Apartments in the West Ward.
VideoMore Video » In seconds, the monitor filled with a blue-and-white wallpaper emblazoned with gang names, including that of MS-13, the notorious gang from El Salvador that has taken hold in a handful of cities across the United States. With a click, there was more: photographs of her 16-year-old drinking beer and Cognac, and making distinctive hand gestures signaling his allegiance to, or affection for, MS-13.
There was even a picture of him with two of the other teenagers the police have identified as suspects, seated in the bleachers of the very schoolyard where the killings later took place. Their fingers are splayed in V’s, thumb and pinky extended, in classic gang signs, and one is wearing across his face a bandana of blue and white, the colors of MS-13.
“Oh, my God,” Ms. Gomez said in Spanish.
Ms. Gomez, of course, is not alone in Newark in trying to come to terms with one of the shocking aspects of one of the city’s most gruesome crimes: that four of the six suspects were younger than the college students whom the police say they played some role in killing.
But in the 10 days since the shootings, with three people in custody and three others the subject of an intense search stretching down the East Coast to Virginia, a rough and disturbing portrait is taking shape of the mixed band of men and boys, of immigrant felons and local teenagers, who, whatever their real gang affiliations, certainly considered themselves a crew of their own.
An illegal immigrant from Peru, Jose Lachira Carranza, 28, possessed of a temper and a growing rap sheet, appears to have directed the group of a half-dozen or more — answered to like a boss. The group pulled off petty stickups in the elevators and parking lots of the sprawling Ivy Hill Park Apartments in the West Ward, according to interviews with relatives, friends and victims, who say the crew extorted people for quick cash, sometimes slipped through apartment doors cracked barely open by frightened residents.
Over the years, Mr. Carranza and Rodolfo Godinez, 24, who is Ms. Gomez’s other son, were each arrested at least twice on serious charges. But together they also carried off crimes under the radar, their victims say. On one occasion, they shook down Anglade Montel, a 33-year-old father of two babies, for $30, he said, adding that he was too terrified to ever call the police.
“I gave them the money,” Mr. Montel said. “I’m trying to protect my family.”
Another time, they surrounded Jason Toomer, 20, intending to give him the beating of his life, he said, mistakenly thinking he had stolen a cellphone from a member of the group.
Mr. Toomer said: “They drink, smoke and drink, and then come out here and harass and rob whoever they want. It’s real nasty, evil stuff, man.”
And a 31-year-old man, Luis Romero, said he turned over his new Nike sneakers to several members of the crew before being hit with a pistol on the back of the neck.
To date, the Newark authorities have offered no public portrait of the group they believe was responsible for the killings of Dashon Harvey, 20; Iofemi Hightower, 20; and Terrance Aeriel, 18. Their official statements have barely expanded beyond the simple, awful charges against the three already in custody: murder and robbery.
But one senior law enforcement official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation is at a critical stage, said that only one gun, a revolver, was used and that it was fired first by Mr. Carranza as he allegedly shot the only survivor, Natasha Aeriel, 19. One of the three suspects arrested so far, the official said, has told detectives that an 18-year-old who is still at large also fired the weapon.
Cellphones and jewelry were taken from the victims, according to the official, who said that Ms. Hightower and Ms. Aeriel, 19, who survived the shooting, were both slashed in the face with a knife or machete.
Motive remains one of the mysteries. From the first hours after the killings, there has been talk in the neighborhood that one victim could have angered the group with a real or perceived sexual advance on one of the teenagers. Some people have suggested that the victims, weeks from going off to college, were dancing in the schoolyard and did a move the crew mistook as a kind of gang provocation. Empty beer bottles were found at the scene, and could have fueled the violence.
The police have repeatedly emphasized that, so far, they do not believe the tragedy was gang-related. Garry F. McCarthy, Newark’s police director, noted that none of the suspects appear in gang databases, for the state, for Essex County, or for Newark
“At this point there is nothing in this case that indicates that this has to do with a gang angle, gang initiation, or gang violence,” Mr. McCarthy replied testily to a reporter’s inquiry about the apparent interest in gangs among the suspects. “The motivation seems to be a robbery. Whether or not a 15-year old kid claims he is an MS-13 member, there’s a difference between a gang member and a wannabe. It’s something unfortunately within this culture, because sometimes kids aspire to that.”
Many questions, then, remain. Most of the answers, of course, rest with the six people who, if the authorities are right, went from a relatively short, unremarkable career of troublemaking and midgrade terrorizing to one of this city’s more sickening spasms of violence late on a Saturday night in one of Newark’s safer neighborhoods.
Ivy Hill
The complex is known locally as a United Nations of sorts. The Ivy Hill Park Apartments, built in 1952, comprise 10 15-story buildings spread out over more than half a mile of one of Newark’s safer and most ethnically mixed neighborhoods. Its 10,000 residents — Eastern Europeans were the first to come — now include people from as many as 40 countries, according to the private complex’s managers.
There are Central Americans, Pakistanis, Indians. Most recently, single men from Honduras have been cramming into apartments and finding day work. The hallways of the different buildings are suffused with the smells of regional cooking. There are large green lawns and manicured flower beds. There is a synagogue, an Indian chapel, a dentist and a physician.
And a gym with a boxing ring, and a trainer who works at keeping neighborhood children out of trouble.
“It’s like a little city here, basically,” said Joseph Catalano, an assistant administrator of the complex. “There’s a lot of different cultures, and they all seem to get along.”
Several residents and officials at the complex said the place had come a long way from what they regarded as the true bad days of gang activity. They recalled that years ago, Ivy Hill residents were often afraid to approach their own apartments because of the gantlet of gang members lurking around the doorways of the buildings.
“It’s definitely a better area up here than the rest of Newark,” said Chris Yearty, who has lived next to the complex for nearly 30 years. Many people went there, he said, “to have a better life.”
But it is no shock that even a Newark housing success can have its dark corners. Some of the 10 buildings — chiefly the four along Manor Place — have been plagued by garbage and mischief, residents say. Drug dealing nearby is hardly uncommon. Parties could get out of hand. Cars were stolen. Lights were broken. Fists could fly, and weapons could be brandished.
All six of the suspects lived at one time or another in Ivy Hill, and they were considered among the complex’s most menacing elements. They hung out in Ivy Hill’s parking lot. They roamed its hallways with little resistance from security guards, some of them off-duty Newark police officers. They returned, even after they had been evicted.
And they lurked in a place known as “the bushes,” a garbage-strewn thicket of high weeds behind two of the buildings where they could set upon anyone who used a dirt path as a shortcut to a nearby shopping center, according to residents and several of those who said they had been victimized.
Jason Stonewall, 21, an Ivy Hill resident, said Mr. Carranza and his group seemed to prey on weak targets, like people who traveled alone or were small in stature.
Daniel Pena, 52, said the group had at times over the years forced him to stay indoors, marooned in his apartment.
“I fear going out on the streets,” Mr. Pena said. “If you have words with one, you have words with all of them.”
The Boys
The scene played out more than once: The group, led by one of the older men, would come to scoop up one of their youngest members, a 15-year-old boy who was known as something of a class clown at the Mount Vernon School close to the complex. Mr. Godinez, now 24, would scream at the younger boy — the son of his mother’s sister — to come along. They were looking to make trouble, and they wanted him to be part of it.
The boy, according to witnesses, would often end up in tears. But he would always go.
“He was not trouble like the rest,” said Mr. Toomer, the Ivy Hill resident. “When the crew would come around and start yelling at him, you would see a change. He would do whatever they wanted because he was so scared.”
The extent of the involvement of the four teenagers, whose names have been withheld by the authorities, in the killings, is a large, open question as the investigation continues. Three of them had long been close friends and were considered around the complex almost as one unit: Ms. Gomez’s nephew, who was the first to be arrested; her 16-year-old son, who remains at large; and another 15-year-old, who was arrested on Friday. The fourth, who the police believe is 18, has not been caught.
But interviews with friends and relatives, and an examination of the Web sites where several of the teenagers had their own pages, suggest that they were taken with the idea of gang culture, however real their actual ties.
The MySpace page of one of the 15-year-olds, in which he refers to himself as “$hotgun,” is a mix of harmless juvenile material (a nod to “The Simpsons,” for instance) and more sinister talk and symbols. He disparages the police; the page is littered with references to MS-13 and exchanges with others pledging a similar solidarity with the Central American gang. (“Blue and white till I die,” says one.)
MS-13, formed by El Salvadoran refugees in Los Angeles in the early 1970s, has quickly grown to become one of the nation’s most diverse, violent and enigmatic street gangs, according to law enforcement officials. The name, according to a Justice Department assessment, derives from the Spanish words “mara” (posse) and “Salvatrucha” (street-wise Salvadorans).
In an effort to expand its size and influence, MS-13 dropped its original requirement that only Salvadorans could belong, but is still run by former members of the Salvadoran militias, a fact that has given it a reputation for ferocious violence even by gang standards and a penchant for crimes involving machetes.
New Jersey police and prosecutors began to see signs of MS-13 locally in the late 1990s and, according to the Justice Department assessment, by 2005, the group was active in 36 municipalities in the state, including Newark. Prosecutors say the Los Angeles-based leaders of the two major factions, or “cliques” — the Normandy Locotes Salvatruches and the Leeward Locotes Salvatruches — have made frequent trips to New Jersey to recruit members and organize and plan various criminal endeavors.
Of course, as with many of the country’s other major gangs — the Bloods, for instance — there is great appeal for young people to want to be seen as affiliated with MS-13, to bond, to intimidate, to boast.
And that may well be the extent of this group’s connections.
Still, in one episode last month, said Luis Ramirez, a cousin of two of the members of the group, he saw one of the 15-year-olds and the 16-year-old, wearing masks, try to rob several young people on the complex parking lot. The assailants panicked, only managing to strike one of the intended victims in the head with a gun handle.
The descent into the group’s ad-hoc criminal enterprise seems to have happened rather quickly for the 15-year-old who often wound up crying. He had, within the last two years, won an award for being one of the most-improved students in school, and the mother of an eighth-grade classmate said he often waited to walk his little sister home.
Jonathan Ortiz, 14, a friend and classmate, said he saw the transformation happen all but in front of him.
“When his cousin started coming around, he started drinking and smoking,” Jonathan said. “He started carrying around weapons. He carried around a machete and a flat-head screwdriver.
“They hang around and claim they’re a gang.”
One friend and classmate of Ms. Gomez’s 16-year-old son said that he had been beaten during his initiation into the gang, and that he wanted to quit recently. She described him as not nearly as tough as he wanted to seem, and as something of a pawn of his older brother, Mr. Godinez. She said he had actively discouraged his younger cousin from becoming more involved.
“I personally think it’s Mr. Godinez who pressured him,” she wrote in an e-mail interview. “I know he was a very bad influence on his brother, which made me hate him.”
The Men
Mr. Godinez and Mr. Carranza were the group’s leaders, according to interviews. When they moved together as a group, no one ever so much as walked in front of Mr. Carranza, at 28 the oldest of the bunch.
“He’s just got this energy about him,” recalled Mr. Stonewall, the Ivy Hill resident.
Mr. Carranza, a father to one child, sometimes worked as a day laborer. He was known, according to those who worked with him, for regularly being hung over when he showed up for work in the morning at a day-laborer site in West Orange. He had been arrested for assault more than once, and was accused of raping a 5-year-old.
Mr. Godinez had a record, too, including a robbery outside a bar in which a man was stabbed in the back and critically wounded. Despite felony charges against both men, both had been released on bail or probation.
They always came back to Ivy Hill.
There was at least one person there who once held out hope for Mr. Godinez. Juan Rivas, who ran the boxing program in the complex’s gym, said Mr. Godinez, when he was 12, had showed promise and power. He weighed 120 pounds, trained five days a week, and won two of his first three competitive fights. “He suddenly stopped training because he said he needed to work,” Mr. Rivas recalled. “It’s sad because you can’t control these boys. I guess we lost with him.”
Mr. Godinez and the others, then, the emerging portrait of them indicates, wound up more committed to a different kind of violent routine.
With regularity, the older men, according to residents, would buy liquor or beer from the store adjacent to their favorite spot outside the apartment buildings. They would drink with the boys, and trouble often followed.
Mr. Montel, a repeat victim, said that twice, he was awakened at night by banging on his apartment door. Each time, including one night this summer, he looked out to see Mr. Godinez, with others behind him. He paid up: This time it was a $20 bill.
“They don’t work,” he said of Mr. Godinez and the others. “They just whip people to get money.”
But Mr. Montel would not call the police.
“Listen, when you call the police, you know what happens?” he asked. “They might try to kill you.”
Reporting was contributed by Annie Correal, John Eligon, Kareem Fahim, Andrew Jacobs, Daryl Khan, David Kocieniewski, Toby Lyles and Carolyn Wilder.
