Jersey Jihadist by Steven Malanga, City Journal 17 September 2014
Why have investigators downplayed a murder suspect’s radical beliefs?
Brendan Tevlin was catching up with old friends and classmates after returning home to Livingston, New Jersey, following his first year at the University of Richmond. On the night of June 25, the 19-year-old spent several hours at a friend’s place in West Orange, a town bordering his own, then texted his mother that he was heading home. He never arrived. Somewhere around midnight, as Tevlin pulled up to an intersection bordering a large wooded area, at least three and possibly four men approached his car. One of the men opened fire, killing the college student in a murder that shocked the quiet neighborhood, where violence is rare.
In the ensuing days, authorities claimed that their preliminary investigation determined that Tevlin had been “targeted,” a phrase suggesting that perhaps the young man had been the victim of a hit engineered by someone he knew. The viciousness of the killing—Tevlin had been struck by eight bullets—was one indication, investigators said, that this was more than just a chance encounter, such as a robbery gone bad. “It does not appear to be random,” a chief investigator said. Friends and family, however, were baffled by the authorities’ conclusion. “He was literally a good kid. No enemies—he always avoided controversy,” a family friend told the press.
Those who knew Tevlin were closer to the truth than the investigators. Three weeks after the incident, police tracked down Tevlin’s alleged killer, Ali Muhammad Brown, living in a wooded area not far from where he’d shot the former Seton Hall Prep lacrosse player. Fingerprints that Brown had left on several items he’d stolen but later discarded led investigators to Seattle, where they learned that he was wanted for several killings. Ballistics tests determined that the same gun used to kill Tevlin had been employed in the Seattle-area murders of Dwone Anderson-Young and Ahmed Said on May 31. Witnesses identified Brown as the shooter, and Seattle police issued an alert for him, but he somehow made it across the country in just a few weeks, evading detection.
Essex County, New Jersey prosecutors said that robbery had been the apparent motive in the Tevlin case, too, and they now believed that Brown had seemed to select Tevlin randomly.
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