A man was killed outside a store in Trenton Sunday. (Penny Ray - Trentonian)
A man was shot and killed Sunday afternoon, marking the third murder to occur in the capital city this weekend.
The man was shot in the head outside a store located in the 900 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard a little before noon. He was later pronounced dead at the hospital.
Residents on the block said they were inside their homes at the time of the shooting, and no one could provide details of what happened just prior to the incident. But one man said the store attracts a lot of foot traffic, which compounds with the open-air drug activity that's rampant on MLK.
"I’ve lived in the neighborhood all my life and the Boulevard has a drug problem," a man who asked to remain anonymous said.
Police say the MLK shooting appears to be an isolated incident not connected to the shootings in South Trenton that claimed two lives on Friday night and Saturday morning.
Trenton Police Director Ernest Parrey Jr. said Sunday that "it's very disappointing" to learn about another capital city homicide less than 24 hours after community leaders spoke about peace in the very same neighborhood where the murder occurred.
"We're putting in double time working on this violent crime strategy," Parrey said. "We're working with our law enforcement partners and the faith-based community as we did yesterday. Now we have a homicide right in one of the areas where we were pleading to the public. So, the question now becomes: is the public going to answer the call? The police department and the mayor can't do this alone. The community knows who did this. Are they willing to step up and say 'We're not going to have this in our neighborhood; we're not going to subject our children to this?'"
One of the concerns community activists and residents speak about most often is the lack of police walking in Trenton's high-crime neighborhoods. Residents wonder why state police and sheriff's officers don't focus on the areas near schools and downtown while TPD officers walk beats in the high-crime neighborhoods such as MLK, Lamberton Street, Stuyvesant Avenue, Oakland and Hoffman, Prospect Village and the North 25 Housing complex.
"We don't discuss deployment efforts, but I can tell you we work hand-in-hand with New Jersey State Police," Parrey said. "We have areas in the city where we conduct strategic patrols. Unfortunately, an incident like this where someone wanders out of their home with malice in their heart, then walks to a building and takes a life, is a crime that's not suppressible."
This is a developing story.