Out front, a couple of regular customers pulled up in a Mercedes-Benz E350. The passenger got out, but the driver remained behind the wheel, talking on a cellphone. Nearby, four young men lingered, their faces covered with scarves and hoods, eyeing the car as they walked past it twice, the store owner recalled.
One of the men jumped into the car and told the driver to get out, the store owner said. The driver resisted and slammed the car into reverse, hitting a parked Jeep, which tossed the assailant from the car. A shot was fired. The men fled, leaving the car behind and its driver wounded.
The episode was among the latest in an epidemic of carjackings in and around Newark. That gnawing reality was put in sharp relief on Dec. 15, when a young lawyer was shot and killed as he struggled with assailants intent on stealing his 2012 Range Rover in the parking garage of the Mall at Short Hills, a retail center in Millburn, N.J., that attracts the affluent.