By Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writer | Thursday, August 22, 1991
The Record (New Jersey) | Four Star B | NEWS | Page B03
A 23-year-old man was fatally shot in front of his home Tuesday night by a man who had come to his door asking for water for his car radiator, officials said.
Sergio Novo died at 3:55 a.m. in the surgical intensive care unit of University Hospital in Newark of a gunshot wound to the head, a hospital spokesman said.
Investigators do not know the motive for the shooting, nor do they have a suspect, said Bergen County First Assistant Prosecutor Paul Brickfield. Authorities do not believe robbery was a motive, he added.
“We are actively investigating his movements over the last few days and his associations and activities to try to come up with who might have had a motive to shoot him, or if this was a random activity,” Brickfield said.
Shortly before 10 p.m. Tuesday, Brickfield said, an unidentified man knocked on the door at 30 Truman Road, where Novo lived with his parents and grandmother. Novo went outside with a pitcher of water for the man, who had requested it for his car radiator.
Shortly afterward, Novo’s family and neighbors heard a “metallic noise and the sound of a car screeching,” Brickfield said. A neighbor went outside and found Novo lying on the street.
Brickfield said witnesses saw a late-model, four-door car, blue or black, possibly a Buick Century or Electra, stopped in the middle of Truman Road.
On Wednesday afternoon, John Penetra, whose son Luis was a friend of the victim, went to visit Novo’s family at their single-family home at the corner of Halsey Place and Truman Road. No one answered the door.
Penetra had heard about the shooting and wanted to find out if it were true.
“Sergio, he’s a beautiful man,” Penetra said in heavily accented English. “What a shame. I can’t believe this.”
He spoke in Spanish with a woman on Halsey Place; she told him no one had seen the shooting but that afterward everyone had come out of their homes.
Other neighbors, including a woman who said Novo was “a nice young fellow,” declined to comment or to be identified.
Novo had been a New Jersey Bell cable installer for the past 16 months and was a U.S. Navy veteran, officials said.
The shooting is being investigated by North Arlington police, the homicide squad of the Prosecutor’s Office, and the Bergen County Sheriff’s Department.
Anyone with information is asked to call the North Arlington police at 991-4400 or the homicide squad at 646-2300.
Keywords: NORTH ARLINGTON; SHOOTING; DEATH; MURDER
ID: 17353225 | Copyright © 1991, The Record (New Jersey)
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