ELIZABETH, N.J. — Francine Graham once lived in a corner condo on a quiet street in Elizabethport, New Jersey, earning a living as a home health aide.
She died in a frenzied shoot-out with police in Hudson County, carrying a 12-gauge shotgun as she followed her boyfriend into a kosher market to kill Jews.
The state’s Attorney General said Thursday the three victims inside—a shopper, the owner, and a worker—were likely killed in the first minutes of the hour-long stand-off.
“I was shocked when I heard that it was her,” one of Graham’s neighbors, Lawrence Baisden, told PIX11 on Thursday, when we visited Graham’s former home.“She seemed like a nice, caring person.”
Graham, 50,lost her condo last year, when she defaulted on mortgage payments and was forced into foreclosure.
Her unit, 68A, had a lock on the door, when we visited the development on Magnolia Avenue.
One woman across the street from Graham’s house told us FBI agents had visited the street on Wednesday.
“They asked my grandma a couple of questions,” resident Gabby White told us.“People get caught up with the wrong people.”
Lawrence Baisden said Graham was always kind to him, before she moved out.She offered to help, after he broke his hip and was using a cane to walk.
“She told me she was a health aide, and anytime I need help or anything, just let me know,” Baisden told PIX11, quoting Graham.
But Baisden didn’t have good things to say about Graham’s boyfriend, David Anderson, who was captured on surveillance in Jersey City leading the way into the kosher market.
Anderson was carrying an AR-15 rifle, according to the Attorney General, while Graham allegedly followed, hoisting the shotgun.
“He’d just be out here staring,” Baisden said, recalling that Anderson used to stand in the front yard of Francine Graham’s home.
“He always had a mean look on his face, like he was angry about something.”
Investigators told PIX11 Wednesday that Anderson had posted anti-Semitic statements about Jews on his Facebook page, shortly before he carried out the deadly shootings.
The FBI was checking for potential ties to radical Black Israelite groups.
The Attorney General said the couple ambushed Jersey City police detective, Joseph Seals, when he approached their U-Haul van Tuesday at a cemetery that wasn’t too far from the kosher market.
Shortly after the detective was killed, surveillance and CCTV cameras showed the U-Haul van moving slowly up Martin Luther King Drive and double parking across the street from the store, owned by an Orthodox Jewish family that had moved to Jersey City from Brooklyn.
David Anderson had served four years in the U.S. Army reserves, but he’d been in and out of trouble with the law since the early 2000’s.
He had arrests in Ohio and Hudson County, New Jersey.
The Attorney General said Thursday that Francine Graham bought two of the guns used in the attacks in Ohio, last year.
Another neighbor in Elizabethport, Anthony Shipman, is still trying to process that Graham was the killer caught on surveillance storming into the market.
“I guess you don’t know who your neighbors are,” Shipman said.“You would never think to have a neighbor to do something like that, especially a woman.”
