The official account is a sterile paragraph, a few clinical sentences about an encounter, and a discharge of a firearm. The human account, offered by a grieving family on frozen streets, is one of masked men and drawn guns, of a minivan pulling away and a father of two falling dead.
Between these two stories lies a gulf now measured in protests, vigils, and a demand for answers that echoes through a city long acquainted with loss.
The New Jersey Attorney General’s Office is investigating the fatal officer-involved shooting that occurred shortly after 1 p.m. on Monday, Jan. 19, near Ross Street and Evergreen Avenue.
According to the state’s preliminary statement, Newark police officers “encountered several civilians.”
One officer fired a weapon, striking two men. Both were taken to University Hospital.
One, 43-year-old Wali Bey, was pronounced dead. The other remains wounded.
No officers were hurt.
That is all the law requires the state to say for now.
It is not enough for the family, nor for the community, to hold vigils at the scene and protests outside the 5th Precinct.
They have painted a starkly different picture. Relatives say Bey was sitting in the driver’s seat of a white minivan when unmarked cars arrived.
Men in plain clothes and masks, they say, emerged with guns drawn. Bey, they contend, fearful and unaware that these were police, attempted to drive away. Shots followed.
“What would you do?” asked Mustafa Bey, a cousin of the victim, standing outside police headquarters on Wednesday. “Men in masks coming toward you with guns.”
He told reporters no weapon was found in his cousin’s vehicle, insisting Bey never carried one.
The city’s leadership has issued statements urging patience and trust in the investigative process, warning against “misinformation.”
Mayor Ras J. Baraka called the shooting a “heartbreaking tragedy.”
Yet the call for calm collides with the raw narrative of a masked confrontation, a narrative that gains potency in a national climate where the sight of officers firing at a person in a vehicle has, too often, preceded a funeral.
“On Monday January 19, 2026, a shooting happened down on Evergreen Place by the grocery store area, which is known as the Seth Boyden and Dayton Street area,” said Alonzo Herran Jr., a candidate for councilman at large. “This is home to me and thousands of others who grew up in the projects. One of the victims Wali Bey is someone I grew up around and know his whole family.”
The state’s investigation, mandated by a 2019 law, will eventually be presented to a grand jury. That process, officials say, may take about 20 days.
For now, the Bey family is left with the hollow mechanics of procedure and the visceral memory of a man they describe as a lifelong Newark resident, a business owner, a father to an 18-year-old and a 2-year-old.
On Wednesday, more than 80 people crowded the steps of Newark Police Headquarters.
Their signs read “Justice for Wali Bey!” Their chants demanded an end to the violence. Officers watched from behind glass.
The scene was peaceful but pointed, a public insistence that a man’s death not be swallowed by bureaucratic silence.
The truth of what happened on Ross Street on a Monday afternoon rests with ballistics, with video perhaps, with sworn testimony yet to be given.
But the conviction on the street, fueled by an account of masked men and a fleeing minivan, is already forming. It is a conviction that the official story, in its cautious brevity, has done little to dissuade.
The city waits, not just for facts, but for a credible explanation that can bridge the chasm between a state press release and a family’s devastating loss.
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