With authorities clamping down tight on information about Monday night’s shooting at Montgomery Terrace, details that might normally be available can only be teased out from a rumor mill of sometimes conflicting accounts.
The Monmouth County Prosecutor’s office, which is leading the investigation, has declined to identify the victims, say where they are hospitalized or describe the circumstances of the shooting, among other details. Red Bank police have followed suit.
First assistant Monmouth County prosecutor Peter Warshaw says the blackout is necessary because the shooting suspect, Anthony Sims, is on the loose, armed and dangerous. Information is being withheld, he and local police officials say, to protect the victims and their families as well as the integrity of the investigation itself.
Sims, 19, gives addresses in both Red Bank and Eatontown. He has been charged in absentia with three counts of attempted murder.
According to residents of the 40-unit apartment complex who spoke to redbankgreen on the condition that they not be identified, the two victims were young adult brothers, one of whom had a girlfriend living in the complex.
One of the men was shot in the neck and the abdomen, the neighbors say, and may be paralyzed. The other was shot in the shoulder and is expected to fully recover, they say. (Another version of this says that one brother was shot in the neck and shoulder and the other was hit in the stomach.)
Neighbors say they knew the men only by their street names, which they declined to give.
A view of Montgomery Terrace, scene of Monday night’s shooting.
The word within the complex, several neighbors say, is that the shooting followed an argument between a man and a woman. At first, the woman’s younger son intervened, apparently quelling the dispute.
Shortly afterward, though, the woman’s older son got wind of the argument, and feeling his mother had been treated disrespectfully, “he retaliated,” one neighbor says.
It’s not clear, however, whether the sons are the shooting victims.
One woman told redbankgreen she heard three gunshots at around 11:35p and looked out her window to see a man running away in a red jacket as the two victims lay on the wet ground outside a row of north-facing apartments. It was raining at the time, she said.
Red Bank police have declined to comment on any aspect of the case, except to acknowledge that an all-out search for Sims is underway by Red Bank Police, the prosecutor’s office and other law enforcement agencies.
Warshaw told redbankgreen last night that the medical conditions of the victims were unchanged from late Tuesday afternoon, when they were reported to be in stable but critical condition at an undisclosed hospital.
