Today marks the four-year anniversary of the unsolved fatal shooting of a popular Rahway entrepreneur, and acting Union County Prosecutor Lyndsay V. Ruotolo is renewing a request for information from members of the public in an attempt to help solve the crime.
The Prosecutor’s Office today is re-releasing a video clip pulled from surveillance footage recorded just before the shooting took place, depicting the two masked suspects responsible for the killing.
According to officials, police responded to the 1500 block of Irving Street in Rahway at approximately 9:15 p.m. on Friday, February 26, 2016, to find 21-year-old Jamal Gaines suffering from a gunshot wound, and he was pronounced dead shortly thereafter.
A joint investigation involving the Union County Homicide Task Force, the Rahway Police Department, and the Union County Sheriff’s Office’s Identification Unit revealed that two people with their faces obscured by fabric accessed Gaines’s sneaker store through a rear utility door, resulting in a physical struggle that culminated in the fatal shot being fired.
At that point, the two suspects ran out of the building the same way they came in, after which they were seen on surveillance footage sprinting down a rear alley, with one of the two exhibiting a pronounced limp.
The suspect with the limp appeared to be wearing dark pants, light-colored sneakers, and a dark hooded sweatshirt with a light-colored patch on the left arm.
The other suspect appeared to be wearing a lighter-colored hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans, and brown or beige shoes. Both brandished handguns.