Newark NJ Police Officer Murder by 14-Year Old
NEWARK, N.J. March 8, 2025 A 14-year-old shot and killed a police officer and wounded another Friday evening in New Jersey, authorities said, in a chaotic scene that witnesses described as seeing officers running down a busy street before they heard a volley of a dozen or more gunshots.
The slain officer, 26-year-old Joseph Azcona, was part of a team of Newark police detectives and federal agents that had gone to capture a suspect in an illegal weapons sting when the officer was fired on in his vehicle, authorities said.
“He didn’t even get a chance to step out of the vehicle before he was struck,” Emanuel Miranda, Newark’s director of public safety, told a Saturday morning news conference with Newark’s mayor and top prosecutor.
Miranda called Azcona a “true hero.”
The other officer who was struck was hospitalized with injuries that were not expected to be life-threatening, authorities said. Newark Mayor Ras Baraka called the shooting a “heinous, callous disregard for humanity” and those officers had gone to the scene knowing that “grave danger was possible.”
Police took five people into custody, including the 14-year-old who was charged with murder, attempted murder and possession of illegal weapons, Essex County Prosecutor Theodore N. Stevens II told the news conference.
