Suspect in 2014 Trenton murder charged in Ewing killing from 2012
A city man already in jail and awaiting trial for a 2014 killing has been charged with murder in connection with another slaying that took place in Ewing in 2012.
Jared Littlejohn, 22, of Trenton, was gunned down and run over with his own vehicle in broad daylight on Sept. 27, 2012 on Parkside Avenue in Ewing, and authorities now say it was 29-year-old Markquice “Tank” Thomas who was responsible for the death.
Littlejohn was abducted from a Ewing supermarket and driven a short distance to the location on Parkside, where he was “assaulted and shot in the head,” according to a press release issued jointly Tuesday by the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office and the Ewing police.
The county’s Homicide Task Force, along with the township police, investigated the case, leading to the charges being filed against Thomas late last week, according to the release. He’s been charged with murder, kidnapping, robbery, and weapons offenses.
Thomas was notified of the charges in Mercer County jail, where he’s been held after his indictment on murder charges related to the killing of 44-year-old Joseph “Power God” Gaines last Spring.
Gaines, a former city drug dealer, who had reportedly turned his life around to become a counselor to troubled youth, was shot in the head while sitting in his SUV parked on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard in Trenton on March 9, 2014. Initially Gaines survived, clinging to life in a city hospital for nearly a month. Thomas was arrested and charged with attempted murder not long after the shooting, and when Gaines finally succumbed to his injuries on April 3, the suspect’s charges were upgraded to murder.
He was already being held on $500,000 cash bail in connection with the Gaines murder, and he’s now being held on an additional bail of $1 million, which also must be paid in cash.
Thomas was also previously arrested in 2011 in connection with an incident similar to what preceded the murder of Littlejohn.
In May of that year, a 49-year-old male victim reported to police that he was on Bellevue Avenue when two men grabbed him, threw him in a car and drove him to Stuyvesant Avenue. Once there, according to police at the time, the two men tried to rob the victim, who was then shot in the feet when he attempted to flee.
Thomas, along with city resident Tahir Davis, was arrested and charged in connection with that incident, though the status of that case is unclear at this time.
Davis, 25, was just recently in the news as well, after he was arrested March 18 in Trenton on drug charges.
