In the early hours of Sunday, November 16, 2025, 32-year-old woman Alyssia Murphy sat in a silver Toyota Camry parked along Coolidge Avenue in Trenton, New Jersey, talking with a friend while the neighborhood was still quiet before dawn. The calm of that morning shattered when her boyfriend, 36-year-old Trenton resident Lamont Truitt, walked up to the car and began arguing with her, an encounter that neighbors would later remember only by the sudden crack of gunfire and the wail of sirens
racing toward Oakland Street. Moments after the confrontation began, Truitt allegedly drew a handgun and fired repeatedly into the vehicle, striking Murphy and her friend as chaos exploded in the confined space of the Camry.
Around 5:50 a.m., Trenton's ShotSpotter system detected multiple gunshots near Oakland Street, and emergency calls poured in reporting that a woman had been shot in the leg. Police officers arriving in the area found Murphy's friend wounded on the 200 block of Coolidge Avenue and rushed her to Capital Health Regional Medical Center, while at almost the same time another report came in that a second female victim had been shot multiple times by a man fleeing in a silver, four-door car. Investigators would later piece together that after the friend managed to escape the vehicle despite her injury, Truitt allegedly climbed behind the wheel of the Camry, with Murphy still inside, and sped away from Trenton toward the Pennsylvania state line, leaving behind a street littered with shell casings and stunned residents who had heard the shots but never seen the shooter.
Roughly two hours later, the violent trail ended beside the Delaware Canal in Lower Makefield Township, Pennsylvania, where officers discovered the silver Toyota Camry abandoned near East Ferry Road. Inside, they found Murphy's body, lifeless in the same car where the argument had begun, her injuries consistent with being shot multiple times. The discovery linked the Bucks County crime scene back to the earlier gunfire in Trenton, and police from both states began coordinating a joint investigation, tracing the Camry's path and gathering surveillance footage, witness statements, and physical evidence to reconstruct the final hours of her life. Authorities publicly confirmed that the domestic dispute in Trenton and the body found by the canal were part of a single, continuous chain of events, turning what had first looked like separate incidents into one grim case that crossed state lines.
As detectives from the Mercer County Homicide Task Force and the Trenton Police Department pieced together what had happened, attention focused squarely on Truitt. According to prosecutors, he is accused of initiating the argument that escalated into gunfire, wounding Murphy's friend and then driving off with Murphy fatally injured in the passenger seat before leaving her body in Pennsylvania. Within hours of the discovery of the Camry, Truitt turned himself in at the Trenton Police Department, and he was taken into custody. He has been charged with first-degree murder in Murphy's death, first-degree attempted murder for the shooting of her friend, first-degree carjacking, multiple counts of weapons offenses, and charges related to unlawful possession of a handgun and being a person prohibited from possessing a firearm. Prosecutors have filed a motion to detain him pending trial, and officials have emphasized that the investigation remains active even as the primary suspect sits behind bars.
In the days that followed, the case reverberated through Trenton and neighboring communities, not just as another statistic in domestic violence crime, but as the abrupt end of a life woven deeply into a large family. Relatives described Murphy as the glue holding together seven siblings, the relative everyone leaned on, a presence whose absence left a raw emptiness at family gatherings and in everyday routines. Vigils and conversations about her death have taken on a tone of grief mixed with anger, highlighting how an argument in a parked car turned into a deadly eruption of violence that crossed a state border before the night was done. While authorities continue to ask anyone with additional information to come forward, the picture they have drawn so far is of a young life cut short in a moment of intimate betrayal, a killing that began on a Trenton street before dawn and ended hours later beside a quiet canal, with a boyfriend now accused of murder and a community left to mourn.
