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.
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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