A New Jersey pastor-politician is gunned down, and a community reels
SAYREVILLE, N.J. — Nicole Teliano used to play games on her phone in the mayor’s office while her mother worked down the hall several evenings a month, tending to the tedious, often acrimonious task of serving in local government.
The 11-year-old girl didn’t mind sharing her mother, Sayreville Councilwoman Eunice Dwumfour, with the nearly 50,000 residents of the central New Jersey town, the young people she nurtured as a pastor of a prosperity gospel church in Newark or the Nigerian church colleague she married in a festive ceremony in Abuja in November.
“Well, my mom was a little bit of extra, so I could share a little bit. There was enough to go around,” Nicole said in a family interview with The Associated Press this month.
Now, friends and loved ones are asking for help figuring out who gunned down the charismatic 30-year-old Dwumfour outside her Sayreville home on Feb. 1. The case is reverberating from New Jersey to West Africa, with touchpoints including politics, religion and money that echo across continents.
Authorities aren't saying much. Dwumfour’s parents and new husband Peter Ezechukwu, who hoped to join his wife in the United States this spring but instead came for her funeral, are frustrated by the ongoing silence. The Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office said it recognizes their concerns but needs to protect the integrity of the investigation.
“Eunice was too good of a person to let (her death) go unanswered,” Mayor Victoria Kilpatrick said at a Feb. 8 memorial service, where hundreds mourned the stylish preacher known as “Pastor Eunney_K.”
“That smile" of hers, Kilpatrick said, “is not going to let us give up.”
A community shaken
Dwumfour (pronounced JEWM’-for), the eldest of five children born to Ghanaian immigrants, had been active in Christian ministry since she was a teen. She graduated from Newark public schools and, after having Nicole, earned a degree in women’s studies from William Paterson University in 2017.
During the 2021 council campaign, she described herself as a business analyst and volunteer EMT, and said she had moved to Sayreville in 2017 because it was a safe community. She had first joined the local Human Relations Commission, then won a close race for city council in 2021, running on a Republican ticket with church friend Christian Onuoha. Their surprise victories left the council with a 3-3 partisan split instead of a 5-1 Democratic majority.
Tensions often ran high at council meetings. It was something that Dwumfour addressed head-on in January. “It’s 2023 and my prayer for everyone is that our mindset will change,” Dwumfour said. “I'd like to wish everyone a happy and glorious new year.”
Four weeks later, she was dead.
Just before the shooting, Dwumfour dropped off a housemate who had been grocery shopping with her. She lived in the suburban apartment complex, Camelot at La Mer, with her daughter and two church friends, family said.
“We were waiting for my mom to look for a parking space, and then she was taking a lot of time, so we started calling her over and over and over, but it wouldn’t pick up. And then we heard gunshots, and we started calling the police,” recalled Nicole, who had dinner ready for her mother. “I thought it was fireworks.”
Neighbors saw a man in dark clothes argue with Dwumfour at her driver’s side window, then open fire before running toward the nearby Garden State Parkway and disappearing. Her white Nissan SUV rolled down the street and smashed into two parked cars.
Family lawyer John Wisniewski acknowledges that it could take time to examine everything from Dwumfour’s cellphone data to the bitter squabbles on council to the global nature of her work with her church, Champions Royal Assembly. With his help, the family finally met with investigators in March. He believes they're “looking at everything.”
But people close to her fear the death of yet another Black woman in America will be forgotten.
“It’s just not common for somebody to come home from work and be ambushed in her parking lot,” said Karl Badu of The Church of Pentecost, the family’s pastor. “She was a councilwoman who just got murdered, brutally.”
Focused on faith
Most of Dwumfour's time and energy seemed devoted to Champions Royal Assembly, which met four or five times a week in a small storefront above a Goodwill store in Newark, where nearly one in three people live in poverty.
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