New details were released Monday on New Jersey’s kosher market shooting. The hate-filled couple’s terror spree began at least a week before. The good news is that they didn’t get a chance to carry out their full plans against the local Jewish community. There were enough explosives in their U-haul to blow a crater a quarter mile across.
On December 3, they shot out the rear car window of “a person clearly identified as of the Jewish faith.” A few days later, they bludgeoned a taxi driver unconscious with a bible, then shot him.
On December 10, 2019, 47-year-old David Anderson and 50-year-old Francine Graham got the whole nation’s attention when they went on a rampage.
As shown on surveillance video, both were wearing “tactical gear” and were armed with “a total of five firearms.” They started shooting even before they went inside the Greenville neighborhood Kosher grocery store.
Inside, the surveillance footage caught audio of Anderson ranting, “They stole our heritage, they stole our birthright, and they hired these guys to stop us.”
They massacred the store owner, 33-year-old Mindel Ferencz and his two employees, Moshe Deutsch, 24 and Miguel Rodriguez, 47. The assailants were killed in a shootout with police.
Police learned that the extremists also killed a police officer just before they shot up the market. That incident caught the pair by surprise and law enforcement thinks it interrupted their true plans enough to save some lives.
Investigators are totally convinced that the couple were motivated by violent anti-semitic and anti-law enforcement ideology, as adherents to the radical group Black Hebrew Israelites.
Apparently, their “God” hates Jews with a fierce passion. A quick check into the background of their cult reveals that Black Hebrew Israelites believe that blacks are the original Jews and the newcomers stole all the Jewishness from them.
“They reject Christianity, Islam, Judaism and [claim] that the true Jews are black,” Oren Segal said. “And that the current ‘so-called Jews’ are liars and have stolen that religion from the true Jews of the world.” Segal is director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. They hated cops for their own reasons.
Police discovered a pipe bomb and enough extra explosives to make a second one, along with a note, “I do this because my creator makes me do this and I hate who he hates.”
“If it exploded in the right place it could have certainly injured or killed people up to five football fields away,” FBI Newark Special Agent in Charge Gregory Ehrie advises.
Two of the weapons recovered from inside the store were a “possibly self-manufactured AR-15-style weapon believed to be used by Anderson and a Mossberg 12-gauge shotgun that Graham was carrying.”
Two handwritten notes were found in Anderson’s pockets. One read “FBIs war on black America 35:45” That was the name of a “1990 documentary and a moment in the film, in which Fred Hampton, the Black Panther leader, describes law enforcement officers as ‘fascist pig cops.'”
The other note was a phone number. The Keyport man who owns it “was charged with illegally possessing 12 firearms after FBI agents interviewed him a few days after the attack.”
After the bloodbath, investigators started to connect the dots from Anderson and Graham to the murder of Jersey City detective Joseph Seals at the Bayview Cemetery shortly before the market massacre.
Seals was assigned to meet a man “whose vehicle had been impounded in an unrelated matter.” He noticed a U-haul matching the description of one the police were looking for, connected to the murder of a taxi driver.
On December 7, according to police, “Anderson and Graham killed Michael Rumberger, a 34-year-old Bayonne taxi driver by bludgeoning him and then shooting him in the head.” They stuffed his body in the trunk of his Lincoln Town Car.
Rumberger’s blood “was found on a bible that belonged to the attackers” and “his DNA was on their clothes and at least one weapon.” Police aren’t sure if they targeted him in advance, but when they got home from killing him they looked up his last name to see what nationality he was.
The FBI didn’t have Anderson on their radar at all, even though he “served in the Army reserves, had a lengthy criminal record for a number of gun charges and served time in prison.” Authorities believe all his guns were bought in Ohio in 2018.
