Law enforcement officials will not say whether the suspect in the fatal shooting of a Lakewood police officer is a member of a gang.
But one thing is certain: Lakewood long has been a hotbed for gang activity.
Police arrested Jahmell W. Crockam, 19, of Lakewood, in the shooting death Friday of township Police Officer Christopher Matlosz. Following a 38-hour manhunt, Crockam was apprehended in Camden early Sunday morning.
Ocean County Prosecutor Marlene Lynch Ford would not say whether Crockam was a member of a gang.
“It is premature to make those determinations,” Ford said Sunday at a news conference. “We are piecing together his affiliations and so forth, and that may or may not be a question of evidence at the trial on this. For those reasons and because I’m not going to talk about evidence on this, that’s it.”
But Rosendo Perez, president of the New Jersey Gang Investigators Association, said: “As soon as I heard about it, I immediately knew it was gang-related.”
In Lakewood, as in many other gang-entrenched cities and towns throughout New Jersey, it has been “business as usual,” said Edwin Torres, an investigator for the State Commission of Investigation. “Gangs are not operating under budget cuts. By no means are these guys scaling back.”
As documented in the weeklong series on “Gangs” last year in the Asbury Park Press, Lakewood has a history of gang violence and gang crime, much of it involving members of the Bloods and its various sets, or sub-groups:
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