DECEMBER 18, 2019 • WWW.THEOBSERVER.COM • VOL. CXXXII, NO. 32
COVERING: BELLEVILLE • BLOOMFIELD • EAST NEWARK • HARRISON • KEARNY • LYNDHURST • NORTH ARLINGTON • NUTLEY
End of Watch | Jersey City Police Department | Tuesday, December 10, 2019
DET. JOSEPH SEALS Heroic Jersey City police veteran, a North Arlington resident, gave life in senseless shootout last week By Kevin Canessa kc@theobserver.com
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he afternoon of Dec. 10, 2019, was as harrowing as any day in recent memory. At The Observer’s office, a mere 7 miles away from it all, we sat and sometimes stood, in stunned disbelief, listening to the Jersey City Police Department on a police scanner app after an alert came in about a possible shooting in the city’s Greenville section. For hours, live and in real time, we heard the echoes of gunshots being fired. Some of those sounds came from radios
operated by officers who were inside Sacred Heart School, a Catholic elementary school that is directly across the street on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive from one of the scenes of carnage. We later learned all of the chaos was the result of Jersey City Police Department Det. Joseph Seals, a resident of North Arlington, being fatally shot in the head as he stood in Bay View Cemetery, on Garfield Avenue, in the second-largest city in New Jersey, as he pursued leads in another case. Following the shooting of Det. Seals, the two suspects, a woman and a man whose names we will not mention, calmly got into a stolen U-Haul van and drove about a mile from Garfield Avenue over to JC Kosher Deli, on MLK Drive, and took the lives of several others, including
Harrison’s Douglas Miguel Rodriguez, a clerk in the store whose young daughter is a student in the Harrison school system. It was all happening in a neighborhood, Greenville, known affectionately by its residents as “The Hill.” This is a neighborhood that has not seen growth the way other Jersey City locations have — think the Downtown Waterfront. Instead, much of Greenville has been ignored for decades upon decades. It is the city’s highest-crime area. Poverty is abundant. The average income is about $33,000 a year, well below the city’s overall average. However, of late, reports estimate that about 100 Jewish families now call Greenville home.
Photo by Teddy Jao Lopez
Jersey City Police Det. Joseph Seals, of North Arlington, seen here in his uniform, was one of two locals who died Dec. 10 in a massive shootout.
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HIGHLIGHTS
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