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Jemmaine T. Bynes, 31, of East Orange had been free since he posted $75,000 bail and was released from the Bergen County Jail in November, two months after the fateful night.
He was pronounced dead before midnight last night after someone shot him several times in an apartment complex courtyard near the intersection of South 10th Street and Woodland Avenue, Acting Essex County Prosecutor Carolyn A. Murray announced late this afternoon.
No arrests had yet been made, and authorities had neither a motive nor a potential suspect, she said.
Bynes and 23-year-old Kashad Ashford had swiped a Nissan Armada in Newark and were casing neighborhoods in North Arlington the night of Sept. 21, authorities said at the time, when a resident called police and an alert was broadcast.
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Kahad Ashford (MUGSHOTS: Various sources)
A PUBLISHER WRITES: A media report this weekend that the state attorney general has “launched” an investigation into the September shooting of an ex-con who tried to ram police with a stolen SUV in Rutherford after crashing during a chase is somewhat disingenuous. READ MORE….
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A Lyndhurst officer began following the stolen SUV but broke off the chase at Route 3, a law enforcement source told CLIFFVIEW PILOT at the time.
Another Lyndhurst unit picked it up on Riverside Avenue near Valley Brook moments later, he said.
Ashford then “proceeded to drive [the Nissan] recklessly through Lyndhurst and surrounding towns,” state Acting Attorney General John J. Hoffman later said.
The SUV headed into Rutherford and crashed on the Ridge Road bridge over Route 3 as Lyndhurst, Rutherford and State Police converged on it.
“Police positioned their vehicles around the SUV in an attempt to apprehend the vehicle’s occupants,” Hoffman said, confirming an earlier CLIFFVIEW PILOT report, “but the driver put the car in reverse, spinning the tires of the vehicle until the roadway was filled with smoke.”
“The Rutherford unit pulled right up behind it,” a source told CLIFFVIEW PILOT. “[Ashford] began ramming it, trying to get away. He kept gunning it so much that it literally melted the rear tire while it was up against the Rutherford patrol car.
“The officers ordered them to stop, to stop, to stop,” the law enforcement source said. “Then the shots were fired.”
At least one was from a shotgun, another source said.
Bynes stumbled out of the SUV and was immediately handcuffed.
Inside the vehicle police found a loaded .357-caliber Magnum handgun and a ski mask.
Ashford died hours later at Hackensack University Medical Center. He’d been out of prison all of 10 months after serving more than three years for aggravated assault and “resisting arrest by fleeing in a motor vehicle, creating a risk of injury” — and had been released only weeks earlier from the Essex County Jail for a subsequent offense, CLIFFVIEW PILOT learned.
As is standard procedure in police-involved shootings in New Jersey, Hoffman’s office was presenting the circumstances of the incident to a grand jury.
Meanwhile, the state Appellate Division has denied Open Public Records Act requests from The Bergen Record and one of its weekly papers for information from the five police departments involved — Lyndhurst, North Arlington, Rutherford, the former Bergen County Police Department (now the Bureau of Police Services in the Bergen County Sheriff’s Office) and NJSP — for what it says are “incident reports, arrest reports, motor dispatch audio and video from patrol cars” from that night.
PHOTO TOP: Courtesy NEWS12 / MUGSHOT: Courtesy BERGEN COUNTY PROSECUTOR
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