A memorial for three students shot to death in Newark outside Mount Vernon High School.
#7. Execution-Style Slayings in Newark
Everyone who knew them said they were good kids. Three were enrolled at Delaware State University, and the fourth planned to join his friends there shortly. So when they were lined up against a schoolyard wall in Newark, N.J., and shot execution-style (one survived) in early August, it rattled the city and its idealistic young mayor, Cory Booker, who had been elected a year earlier on promises to reduce crime. The murders also stoked a national debate about immigration after it was revealed that one of the six suspects was an illegal immigrant free on bail on child-rape charges at the time of the killings.