Police were still on the scene of the River Street shooting at 2 p.m. Saturday. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge)
By JOHN T. WARD
Yet another shooting involving a parked vehicle rocked the West Side of Red Bank Saturday, the second such attack in little more than 24 hours, and the third in seven months.
But unlike the Thursday night incident, in which a man and a woman were shot and critically injured as they sat in a pickup truck, it’s unclear if anyone was in the car, let alone shot, when it was riddled with bullets on River Street shortly after midnight noon Saturday, police said.
“We’re not 100-percent sure it was unoccupied,” Chief Darren McConnell told redbankgreen. “We haven’t had any victims come forward.”
He said the vehicle was “hit numerous times” in the front, though he was unsure if any bullets penetrated glass. McConnell said he did not know the make and model of the car, which is owned by a person he declined to identify because “she’s not the user of the car.” The car is kept locally, he said.
Police remained on the scene at 2 p.m. Saturday, with River Street closed off at Leighton Avenue and about halfway to Shrewsbury Avenue.
redbankgreen was unable to confirm that a silver compact sedan with a missing bumper and exposed radiator was the car that was struck. From outside the taped-off crime scene, that vehicle could be seen to have had its windshield shattered on the lower passenger side, though no bullet holes could be made out from a distance.
The shooting occurred just three blocks north of the attack on Leon Veney, 29, of Red Bank, and Angelique Morris, 23, of Tinton Falls, as they sat in a pickup truck on West Sunset Avenue at around 8:30 p.m. Thursday. No suspect or motives have yet been disclosed.
In the most recent case, though, police have a loose description of a suspect: a tall, thin male of unknown race was seen getting into a dark-colored sedan, possibly driven by another person, McConnell said.
“It sounds like somebody else was driving,” he said.
McConnell said police were looking into a possible connection to the shootings of Veney and Morris, which occurred seven months after Veney’s 28-year-old brother, Perry, was gunned down as he sat behind the wheel of a car on Willow Street in April.
McConnell had previously said authorities were investigating possible connections in the shootings of the brothers.
On Saturday, he said they’re also looking into the possibility of gang warfare as the root of the attacks, though he said “there’s no specific indication” of gang involvement at this point.
Anthony Sims, 25, who pleaded guilty in 2010 to shooting two men at the at the Montgomery Terrace public housing apartments on the borough’s West Side three years earlier, is under indictment and in custody for the Perry Veney shooting.
