Steven Kologi, a 42-year-old white male, was spending New Year’s Eve 2017 where he felt most at home: surrounded by family in their Long Branch, New Jersey house on Wall Street, preparing to welcome the new year together. The gathering was intimate, a celebration in the place where he had built his life with his wife Linda and their children, joined by longtime family friend Mary Schulz.
For Steven, a lifelong Long Branch resident and truck driver for Clayton Concrete, family and simple pleasures were central—softball leagues, bodybuilding sessions, skiing trips, and evenings spent shooting pool, all orbiting around the people he loved most.
As the night approached midnight on December 31, 2017, the mood in the house was that of a family closing out another year together, unaware that it would be their last. At approximately 11:43 p.m., emergency calls reported gunfire at the residence. When officers from the Long Branch Police Department and the Monmouth County Sheriff’s Office arrived, they stepped into a scene of devastation inside the home. Steven, his wife Linda, their teenage daughter Brittany, and Mary Schulz, the companion of Steven’s father, were found in different parts of the house, each fatally wounded by gunfire.
The violence had come from within the family. Steven’s younger son, Scott Kologi, who was 16 at the time, had armed himself with a Century Arms C39v2 semi-automatic rifle that was legally owned by his older brother and kept in the home. In the minutes before the shooting, he prepared himself with unsettling deliberation, putting on a long dark coat, sunglasses, and earplugs to muffle the sound of gunfire. He first drew his mother upstairs toward his darkened room and opened fire on her and then on Steven, before moving through the house to shoot Brittany and Mary on the lower floor. Steven’s father, who was also in the home that night, was spared, left to confront the sudden loss of his son, partner, and granddaughter in a single, shattering burst of violence.
Police found Scott still at the house when they arrived. The rifle used in the killings was recovered at the scene, and he was taken into custody without officers having to search for a fleeing suspect. In the months that followed, investigators from the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office and local law enforcement reconstructed the events of the night, piecing together family accounts, physical evidence, and Scott’s own statements. The case was ultimately moved from juvenile to Superior Court, and he was indicted on four counts of first-degree murder and related weapons charges.
Years later, the quiet suburban street in Long Branch was still marked by what had happened inside that house. In February 2022, a Monmouth County jury rejected defense arguments centered on Scott’s mental health and found him guilty on all charges, concluding that he understood what he was doing when he took up the rifle and turned it on his family. At sentencing in June 2022, he received a term effectively ensuring he will spend the rest of his life in prison, a legal reckoning that could not restore what was lost: a father known as charismatic and devoted, a mother, a daughter on the threshold of adulthood, and a trusted family friend, all erased in the final minutes of a passing year.
