Cory Booker and an MS-13 Massacre

April 4, 2025 by Jack Cashill

In his marathon 25-hour speech this week, it seems unlikely that a lachrymose Sen. Cory Booker gave even a passing thought to the mothers of Dashon Harvey, Terrence Aeriel, Natasha Aeriel, and Iofemi Hightower. If he had, he would not have dared ask America to “think about” the wife and child of an MS-13 gangster shipped off to El Salvador.

Booker knows who these mothers are. I am sure he met them. He was mayor of Newark, N.J. when their children were sexually assaulted and/or murdered in a Newark playground by a gang of illegal aliens. I know about these murders only because I grew up in Newark and follow its news.

Although the largest city in one of America’s most populous states, Newark makes the news only when the gatekeepers of New York’s newsrooms decide it should. And on the night of August 4, 2007, no one wanted to greenlight the story coming out of Newark.

On that steamy evening, Jose Carranza, 28 at the time, and five of his homies were drinking and smoking marijuana in a Newark schoolyard. There they spied four young black students, two of them female, talking and playing music, and judged them easy prey.

These were not members of a rival gang. Far from it. Dashon Harvey, 20, was entering his junior year at Delaware State University. Terrence Aeriel, 18, was to begin at Delaware State the following month. Natasha Aeriel, then 19, also attended Delaware State. Iofemi Hightower, 20, was holding down two jobs while she saved to attend college.

“Itz tym 2 go,” an anxious Terrance Aeriel texted his sister Natasha from his perch on top of a playground apparatus. He could see something the others could not. Although he did not know that the six men and boys walking towards him were affiliated with the violent Central American gang MS-13, he sensed trouble.

Terrance and his three friends promptly headed to Natasha’s car, but it was too late. The men surrounded them before they could drive away and at gunpoint forced them to the ground.

They separated Natasha from the others and began to molest her sexually. “All I could keep doing was saying, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus,’” Natasha would later testify.

One of the gang members put his knee in Natasha’s back and tickled her throat with a machete. It was then that Natasha heard Carranza and his crew kill the three others, execution style, with gunshots to the back of the head. Upon seeing her own blood, Natasha summoned the will to push off her attacker, who shot her and left her for dead. She survived to identify the attackers.

Booker knows this story well. Iofemi Hightower’s mother insisted that her daughter’s casket remain open to show the visible machete scars inflicted by her killers. She had hoped Iofemi’s open casket would galvanize America the way Emmett Till’s did in 1955, but that never happened.

The media gatekeepers succeeded in keeping this story out of the national news for the simple reason that it served no useful political purpose. Booker had been elected mayor of Newark just a year earlier, and he had national potential. The business-friendly young mayor promised a rejuvenated Newark. This incident flew in the face of that promise.

Six months before the playground massacre, Barack Obama announced his candidacy for president. He launched his campaign in the shadow of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, where, said Obama, “Lincoln once called on a divided house to stand together.” Like Obama, Lincoln promised to bridge racial divides, and the last thing the media wanted to provoke was a rift in his base between blacks and Hispanics.

Most dangerously, Jose Carranza had the potential to be the next Willie Horton for whichever candidate ended up owning the policies that had left him free to kill. At the time of the murders, Carranza was out on bail. He was awaiting trial in two separate cases, one the sexual assault of a five-year-old girl.

This would have been troubling enough had Carranza been a citizen or a legal resident, but he was neither. Newark authorities knew he was in the country illegally, but they chose not to notify immigration officials of either arrest. They never did. Newark gloried in its status as a sanctuary city. Still does.

“No one shall be deprived of life, liberty, and property without due process of the law,” said the deluded Booker with regard to the MS-13 gangsters shipped off to El Salvador.

Tell that to the moms, Spartacus.