A New Jersey police officer was shot and killed in a barrage of 29 bullets fired by a 14-year-old with an automatic weapon, before the teen was also shot. Detective Joseph Azcona, 26, a five-year veteran of the Newark Police Department, didn’t stand a chance before he was gunned down Friday night.
He “was shot before he even had the opportunity to leave his police car,” Essex County Prosecutor Theodore Stephens said at a news conference Saturday morning.
The gunfire erupted around 6:30 p.m. in Newark as Azcona, a member of the intelligence unit, and other officers working with the FBI and ATF, probed for guns, officials said.
A second unnamed officer shot in the incident was rushed to the hospital, as was the alleged teen shooter. Both are expected to survive their wounds.
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Immediately after the shooting, N.J. elected officials, Gov. Murphy, and Mayor Was Baraka, publicly lamented the murder. Later, we learned the sickening legal perks awaiting the alleged, “heinous”, cold-blooded teen killer, who won’t be tried in public.
“The state statute requires somebody to be 15 years old to treat it as an adult case,” said Laura Sutnick, a criminal defense lawyer and president of the Bergen County Bar Association. “But if you’re 14, you can’t be waived to adult court.”
For one thing, a family court judge will handle the case in secret proceedings, then decide the verdict — no juries allowed, Sutnick said.
After the trial, the case would be sealed and he’d have no public criminal record.
If the alleged shooter were tried as an adult, a jury could slap him with 30 years to life in prison for killing a cop. But as a juvenile, the most a suspect could face is 20 years — and he probably wouldn’t even serve the whole thing since there’s no mandatory minimum for minors, an expert said.
“They assassinated him — this was a coordinated attack,” an officer said. “They knew it was an unmarked vehicle. They were trying to send a message to law enforcement like, ‘Hey, you’re on our turf.’
Who then better to pull and hold the trigger on an automatic weapon than a 14-year-old who will be passed through a system ill-equipped to render anything close to the proper punishment.
These criminal gangs are SO much smarter than clueless, woke lawmakers, whose ignorance puts brave police officers’ lives at risk
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