Terrence Horton, a 53-year-old Trenton resident, died last Thursday, May 21, from gunshot wounds he suffered during an April shooting at the Kingsbury Towers apartments in the city. He was known as “Chipper” or “Chip" and had a daughter, according to posts on his Facebook page.
His death occurred in the middle of another violent week in the Capital City, when five more would die in shootings, pushing the city’s homicide total to 13 in 2020.
This coming Saturday, May 30, it’ll be 10 weeks since Gov. Phil Murphy issued the statewide stay-at-home order to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
And in that time, 11 Trenton residents have been killed in outdoor shootings, many in daylight hours.
They include the killing, allegedly by a 14-year-old, of a man in the courtyard of an apartment complex on March 23, two days after Murphy’s order, a man shot two days later across town, and five killings over seven days starting two weekends ago.
In between, the city has had numerous, non-fatal shootings, and this past weekend, a Trenton man was killed during a hotel party across the river in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
Trenton police look for evidence at a shooting scene off Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in North Trenton Sunday April 5, 2020.(Photo by Brian McCarthy)
Trenton Mayor Reed Gusciora knows the number, and following a vicious night in early April in which seven people were shot, three fatally, he used his own executive power to implement a citywide curfew, requiring residents to be indoors after 8 p.m. (It has since been relaxed to 9 p.m. for residents.)
And for weeks it worked, with violent crime, and crime after the curfew hour, statistically going in the right direction - down.
But the past two weeks, daylight murders have again dominated the headlines in the Capital City.
He acknowledged Wednesday that the past 10 weeks have been “extremely troubling.”
Trenton is not immune to the issues other cities have had during the pandemic, like Philadelphia and New York, with rising crime rates in some categories even though people should be mostly staying inside, Gusciora said Wednesday.
He said the proliferation of guns, lack of opportunity and an already-depressed economic situation in the city was worsened by the economic byproduct of the shutdown restrictions.
“And we’ll continue to have those challenges," Gusciora said.
But the indiscriminate and retaliatory way people solve drug turf and personal sleights with each other, and the wanton ways younger shooters are using guns, the mayor said, makes it tragically difficult to prevent some of the shootings. “If someone wants to kill somebody, it’s hard to prevent,” he said.
In his nearly two years in office, Gusciora said any strides the city made -- from a major drop in transitional aid from the state, to a police department still catching up from major layoffs in 2011 -- makes it feel at times that the coronavirus threw some progress “out the window.”
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Kevin Shea may be reached at kshea@njadvancemedia.com.