A redbankgreen file photo of Sadiq Palmer playing for Red Bank Regional High School and below a file photo from his high school days. ( Click to enlarge.)
By BRIAN DONOHUE
One of the suspects charged in a double shooting in Red Bank is a former standout high school and college football player who saw his own father gunned down as he prepared for his senior year at Red Bank Regional High School.
Sadiq Palmer is charged with murder and weapons charges in the shooting on River Street July 10 – nine years to the day after Palmer’s own father was shot to death in Eatontown, according to authorities statements and press reports.
Palmer was well-known as a standout wide receiver and safety at Red Bank Regional who graduated in 2016 and went on to a successful four-year college career on the gridiron at the University of Massachusetts.
As news spread across the Red Bank and scholastic sports community, those who followed his career expressed disbelief and dismay.
“I was shocked and saddened because Sadiq is a great kid. And I want to find out – hopefully find out – that he doesn’t have anything to do with it,’’ said Louis “Del” Dal Pra, who served as RBR athletic director when Palmer attended the school. “But you never know. It’s hard. I’m just saddened by it all.”
Palmer, who police said had been living in Freehold, is one of four people charged in the double shooting that left Mikal Muhammed 36, of Red Bank dead and another man injured, the Monmouth County Prosecutors Office announced Friday.
Palmer and Lahmeir C. Hill, 31, of Pemberton Borough (Burlington County) were each charged with one count of first-degree murder, one count of first-degree attempted murder, one count of first-degree conspiracy to commit murder, and various second-degree weapons charges.
Simone K. Moultrie, 53, of Red Bank, was charged with one count of first-degree murder, one count of first-degree attempted murder and one count of third-degree hindering. Ticco K. Griffin, 29, also of Red Bank, was charged with one count of third-degree hindering.
But it was the news of Palmer’s arrest that most stunned those who had watched him on the gridiron and the basketball court.
“I almost fell off my chair,’’ said longtime Red Bank sports booster David Prown about when he heard the news. Like Dal Pra, he said he hoped the allegations prove untrue.
“You thought a kid like that had turned the corner,’’ he said.
Palmer was a standout wide receiver on the 2015 Bucs team that went 11-1, won the school’s first Shore Conference divisional championship and advanced to a sectional championship game for the first time since 1977. He was also a career 1,000 point scorer for the boy’s basketball team.
He signed a letter of intent to play football at Syracuse University, then committed to the University of Massachusetts after a coaching change at Syracuse.
Palmer played four seasons at UMass from 2016-2019. He made 35, 28 and 25 catches in his last three years respectively. A November 2019 Facebook post by his mother Rochelle Bunch shows him in uniform outside the locker room after his final game signing autographs for a crowd of young boys.
“I am so proud of him through adversity,, losing his father from a murder and all he had to go through to cope these past 4 years he pushed through and did well in school and pushed through on the field…I am so proud to be his mom,” the post reads.
The reference is to July 10, 2015, when, just as Sadiq Palmer was beginning summer training camp for his final season at RBR, Palmer’s father Rasheem Perry was shot to death in Eatontown.
Long Branch resident Perry Veney and Frederick Reed of New Castle, Delaware, were each charged with first-degree murder and second-degree possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose.
Coverage of an earlier trial described Rasheem Perry as the brother of Anthony Sims. Sims was found guilty and sentenced 50 years for shooting Perry Veney 15 times while he sat in a car on Willow Street on April 9, 2014. At the time of that shooting, Sims had been out of prison for just three months after serving a sentence for an earlier shooting.
Since returning to New Jersey since graduating from UMASS in 2020, Sadiq Palmer had been coaching locally, several people who knew him said, including a brief stint as an assistant basketball coach at St. John Vianney High School during the 2023-24 season, according to Assistant Principal Richard Lamberson. “He does not work here,” Lamberson told redbankgreen.
Like the man now accused of killing him, friends and family members say Mikal Muhammed harbored dreams of going on to greater heights.
Muhammad owned a recording studio in Eatontown and had moved to California to pursue his career, a family member said. He had traveled back home to visit Red Bank when prosecutors now say Hill and Palmer shot him and left him to die on the sidewalk outside a friend’s home in the neighborhood where Muhammad and Palmer both grew up.
redbankgreen editor Brian Donohue may be reached via email at [email protected] or by calling or texting 848-331-8331 or yelling his name loudly as he walks by. Do you value the news coverage provided by redbankgreen? Please become a financial supporter if you haven’t already. Click here to set your own level of monthly or annual contribution.
