Three years after the death of Jessica Moore in an off-campus shooting, the incident was brought back into light as Nicholas Welch faces murder charges in an eighth-floor room of the Newark courthouse.
The trial began with Seton Hall student witnesses who are challenged with the task of recalling details of events that happened three years ago, in hopes of finally putting the tragedy behind them and bringing peace to the Moore family.
"This is almost three years ago, I can't tell you verbatim exactly what I said. There was a lot going on," Cameron Marshall said in a recording of an earlier trial. He was a member of Phi Beta Sigma and resident of the house where the shooting occurred.
Witnesses testified that Welch tried entering the party when he was denied access and a fight broke out. Then he walked out of the house to his friends nearby and asked one of them, who allegedly had dreads and was wearing red, basketball shorts, for a gun. He went back to into the party and fired shots, injuring four students and killing one.
"They (Welch and group of young men) were right directly next to me. He walked to the group of guys and said 'give me the banger.' He was loud and he sounded upset. I was thinking I have friends in there," said Brianna Bravo, a Seton Hall freshman at the time who witnessed the shooting from outside the house.
Bravo said she got in the van that was picking her up from the party at that point and saw Welch enter the party with a gun in hand.
"We heard a popping noise, 'pop,' 'pop,'" she said. "We sped off as soon as we heard it. We knew they were gunshots."
Bravo said she and friends in the van with her immediately fled the scene. As they were headed to a nearby White Castle restaurant, they yelled to a police officer stationed at the corner of Clinton Street and Tremont Avenue that there was a shooting down the street.
As Bravo arrived at the White Castle, she said students from the party swarmed the area with ripped clothing and blood on them.
Last week ex-convict Isaac Muldrow testified against Welch, saying he met the defendant after the shooting happened three years ago and was told to get rid of the gun used to fatally wound Moore and injure four others, according to nj.com.
Nakeisha Vanterpool, Moore's roommate at the time and a student who was shot in the jaw at the party, also testified last week. Moore was rushing to her friend's aid when she was fatally shot, ac- cording to nj.com.
Lindsay Rittenhouse can be reached at lindsay.rittenhouse@student.shu.edu. Mary Marshall can be reached at mary.marshall@student.shu.edu.
