A man kills his father while high on crack. A man shoots his wife in the back of the head after she says she wants to get a divorce. A mother drunkenly kicks and punches her 14-year-old son to death. An argument over a card game leaves a man riddled with bullets in a housing project. Some are spread up into the suburbs far north. The grittier and poorer cities have higher concentrations - Hackensack, Lodi, Garfield, Cliffside Park, Englewood - but bar fights, gang shootings, domestic disputes, drunken crashes, and robberies have left eighty-two people dead over the course over the past seven and a quarter years (three of these being police shootings).
Ralph Pinto was an eighteen-year-old boy with a plan to rob a drug dealer in South Hackensack in 2005. Little did he know that the dealer was a ranking member of the Latin Kings. They lured him to a parking lot in Lodi where they tried to kidnap him, and ended him leading his bullet-riddled body on the side of the road, and stabbing a female co-conspirator thirty times to silence her. The killers have been convicted.
In 2006, Paul Duncsak was followed into his Ramsey house and shot in the back of the head with a silenced low-caliber pistol by Edward Ates. Ates was convicted after an internet history search showed he had looked up websites on how to commit a perfect murder.
Ricky Smith Jr., 15, was sitting on a curb outside a house party in Teaneck in July 2006 when a fight that began between two rival gangs inside spilled out. A Blood from Paterson opened up the trunk of his car, pulled out a .357 Magnum, and fired into the crowd, hitting Ricky in the back and killing him.
William Marcucci, an associate with the Genovese crime family, was waiting in a car outside a diner in Saddle Brook in 2008 meeting up with an unknown person. While waiting, two hitmen approached him and pumped several shots into the side of his head through the window. He had possibly been suspected of stealing from illegal bookmaking proceeds.
Victor Garcia, 21, was hanging out in Hackensack in the summer of 2009 with a friend who had recently left DDP, a Dominican gang. Some gang members approached; Garcia's friend got away, but they mistook Garcia for him and gutted him with knives and slashed his throat. Garcia lingered for several days in the hospital before dying; the gang members were arrested.
Jonathan Beneduce and Michael Mirasola, two Queens men and possible associates of organized crime, were meeting up with an acquaintance in Teaneck to conduct a drug deal several weeks ago. While sitting in the parked car, Nicholas Kiriakakis of Queens, allegedly connected to the Greek mob, opened fire on them, killing them with multiple gunshot wounds.
This is only a sample of the destruction that wanton violence has left throughout Bergen County.
