The quiet streets of West Berlin were shattered by gunfire Tuesday afternoon when a New Jersey State Police detective shot and killed a 38-year-old man identified by family as Shawn—a father, a fiancé, a man who lived for his two young daughters—just steps from his own home.
The official statement from the Attorney General’s Office is sparse: two detectives with the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force encountered Shawn on Haddon Avenue, a revolver was recovered, and in the span of a fatal encounter, a life was cut short.
But the human cost cannot be so neatly summarized.
Shawn’s mother watched in horror as her son fell. Neighbors heard shouting, then three gunshots.
His best friend, Lee Reed, struggled to speak through grief and rage: “One second I’m angry—next second I wanna cry.”
Shawn was not a statistic; he was a man who took his girls fishing, who wandered the Berlin Mart with them, who, by all accounts, lived for his family.
Now, his daughters will grow up without him.
The state’s mandatory investigation will unfold, as it must.
A grand jury will decide whether the officer’s use of force was justified.
But no legal proceeding can answer the deeper questions that haunt this community tonight: Why did this happen? Was there no other way? Police say a revolver was found at the scene—but what led to that moment? What words were exchanged? What fear or miscalculation turned a routine encounter into a death sentence?
For now, there are only echoes—of gunfire, of a mother’s screams, of a friend’s shattered voice repeating, “That’s all he cared about was his girls.” And in the silence left behind, a town waits for answers.
The Attorney General’s Office announced that a state grand jury voted not to file any criminal charges against a Keansburg police officer who shot and killed Willem “Will” Roman, 46, a cherished son, brother, uncle, and friend, who died on June 14, 2024.
Uniformed officers of the Keansburg Police Department were dispatched to a residence on Seabreeze Way for a welfare check on Roman, who approached the police with a running chainsaw.
Patrolman John Swartz deployed a conductive energy device, and Patrolman Manges fired his service weapon, both striking Roman, who died from injuries sustained during the encounter.
Only two New Jersey officers have been indicted for an on-duty shooting since the current system began. The system has declined charges in at least 40+ fatal incidents since 2018.