On the night of August 21, 2014, Al-Teri Johnson, a 38-year-old Black / African American male from Newark, New Jersey, was fatally shot in the city’s West Ward, his death recorded in headlines simply as that of a “Newark man shot and killed,” the third homicide the city had endured in that single week. In the brief notices that survive online, he appears first as a name attached to a date and place, a resident of Newark whose life ended suddenly in gunfire, and whose body was found in his
own city at the height of a violent stretch late that summer.
The violence that claimed Johnson’s life unfolded largely out of the public eye. Contemporary coverage was sparse, and what was published focused more on the tally of homicides in Newark that week than on the details of how he spent his final hours or what led to the confrontation that ended in shots being fired. Later summaries of the case describe him as having been “found dead” in Newark on that August day, emphasizing that the circumstances were never widely reported, and that his killing quickly blended into a larger pattern of unsolved or underreported violence in the city.
In the days that followed, the official record of Johnson’s life shifted from crime notation to funeral notice. An obituary in The Star-Ledger, carried online by Legacy.com, fixed the date of his death as August 21, 2014, and announced services one week later at Perry Funeral Home on Mercer Street in Newark, followed by burial at Evergreen Cemetery in nearby Hillside. It listed the loved ones left to mourn him: two daughters, Armani Lawalli and Syhima Jones; his mother, Patricia Johnson; his grandmothers, Mary Mayo and Cassie McClurkin; and a wide circle of other relatives and friends. In the condolence messages posted beneath the obituary, family members and friends wrote of a man they remembered with affection and grief, calling him “wonderful” and “respectful,” lamenting that he was “gone too soon” and promising that he would never be forgotten.
Years later, Johnson’s name appears on gun-violence memorial sites and unsolved-homicide databases rather than in follow-up news stories about justice being served. These listings record that he was “lost to gun violence” in Newark on August 21, 2014, and classify his death as a homicide by force, but they also note something more haunting: a review of available public records and local news from that period has not uncovered any report of an arrest or publicly identified suspect in connection with his killing. The case descriptions emphasize the absence of detail and resolution, suggesting that either investigators never announced a breakthrough or any developments that did occur were not shared with the press. In an online forum dedicated to his case, a poster reflects on this silence with frustration, wondering how a killing that coincided with major police operations in the city could remain so disconnected from public narratives about crime and enforcement in Newark. What emerges from this scattered record is the outline of a life cut short and a family that buried their loved one without the public assurance that anyone had been held to account, leaving his story preserved mostly in memorial pages, obituary lines, and the lingering questions of those who still search for answers.
