Just after two in the morning on March 16th, a woman named Susanne “Sue” Clarke picked up her phone and did what every American is taught to do in a moment of crisis. She called 911. She asked for help.
Forty-four minutes later, a police officer named Dallas Gant shot her dead outside her own home on Hemlock Drive.
She was 55 years old. She had two children. She was working on a dog treat business. She had just passed her licensing exam to become an optician again.
Her dogs are named Sammy and AJ, and right now they are being cared for by an animal shelter because their owner was killed by the man she called for help.
She had recently moved to the Lanoka Harbor section of Lacey Township to be closer to the beach.
The New Jersey Attorney General’s Office, which is required by state law to investigate deaths that occur during encounters with law enforcement, has confirmed the broad outline of events and not much else.
A knife was recovered outside the home. Authorities say one officer was hospitalized with a non-life-threatening injury. The details of the encounter, they say, have not been disclosed. The investigation is ongoing. No additional details are being released.
That is the sum total of what the public has been permitted to know about why Susanne Clarke is dead. We can churn up additional facts, but little that enlightens us about what has happened.
Officer Dallas Gant, 37, was sworn into the Lacey Township Police Department in October 2019. He lives on a street in the Forked River section of Lacey Township that is a five-minute drive from the home where Clarke died.
He is a registered Republican. He votes regularly in November.
He has not, according to available records, participated in a primary election in recent years — which is to say, he is the kind of citizen who shows up when it counts publicly but not at the time when voting is consequential, which is as American a habit as any.
Gant graduated from Lacey High School in 2008, earning letters in both baseball and basketball. He then attended Coastal Carolina University, where he completed a Bachelor of Arts in Business Administration in 2012.
In 2015, Gant joined the Seaside Heights Police Department as a Class I Special Police Officer, and after graduating from the Ocean County Police Academy, he became a Class II Special Police Officer. In 2017, he moved to the Ocean County Sheriff’s Department, starting as an Investigator before becoming a Sheriff’s Officer. Over time, he worked in various sections of the Sheriff’s Office, most recently serving in their Marine Unit.
None of that, of course, has anything to do with what happened at 2:44 in the morning on Hemlock Drive. It is simply who he is. It is the texture of a life that continues, while another does not.
Born in New Brunswick, Sue Clarke spent many years in Chesterfield, a township in Burlington County, raising her children and working at Clipper Magazine as an Account Executive. She recently moved to Lanoka Harbor to enjoy life closer to the beach. She had registered as an unaffiliated voter in Ocean County in November 2024.
She typically voted in presidential elections. She was, by the metrics we use to measure civic participation, an ordinary American doing her modest democratic duty every four years and otherwise getting on with the business of living — raising children, working in optical care, planning a small business, loving her dogs, moving to the Jersey Shore for a fresh chapter in life.
That chapter ended when she reached for her phone in the dark hours of a March morning and trusted the system.
Let us be plain about what that system does. In the United States of America, police kill more than a thousand people every year. In 2025, that number was 1,314.
There were only six days in 2025 when police did not kill someone in this country. Six days. The other 359, someone —at least one person—died in an encounter with law enforcement.
The rate at which American police kill civilians is not merely higher than other wealthy nations — it is so dramatically, grotesquely higher that the comparison barely registers as meaningful. Germany. Japan. Norway. Iceland. England. Australia. Canada. In none of these countries do police kill civilians at anything approaching the American rate.
This is not a secret. It has been documented exhaustively by researchers, journalists, and advocacy organizations, precisely because the government itself has historically failed to track it with any reliability.
The victims of this system are not evenly distributed. Black Americans are killed at more than twice the rate of white Americans. Native Americans and Hispanic Americans are killed at elevated rates.
The poor are more vulnerable than the comfortable.
The mentally ill are more vulnerable than the stable. Roughly two-thirds of those killed by police in recent years were not posing a direct armed threat to officers at the moment they were killed.
Susanne Clarke was white, with blonde hair. She was not, by the demographics of police violence, in the highest-risk category. She was a middle-aged white woman in a shore community who called for help in what may well have been a mental health crisis.
Apart from all the things we do not know, she is dead.
Kathy Koumarianos, a registered dietitian and nutritionist living in Monroe, who went to high school with the victim but had not seen her in many years, said, “She was a Beautiful person, and I can’t believe this happened.”
It happens more than 1,000 times each year in the United States, rising annually most of the time.
The attorney general’s office will present its findings to a grand jury, which will decide whether to indict Officer Gant. Prosecutions of officers in cases of lethal force occur in less than one percent of cases nationally. This is not a prediction about what will happen here. It is simply the context in which what happens here will happen.
Susanne Michele Clarke was born October 31, 1970, in New Brunswick. She was predeceased by her mother, Kathleen, and her sister, Jessica. She is survived by her children, Caroline and Chad; her ex-husband, Raymond; her stepfather, Mark; and her sisters, Kristin and Jane.
Her family gathered to celebrate her life on Friday, March 27th, at the Rezem Funeral Home in East Brunswick. In lieu of flowers, her family has asked that donations be made to the Friends of Southern Ocean County Animal Shelter, which is caring for Sammy and AJ.
She called for help.
They sent someone who killed her.
The investigation is ongoing. No additional details are being released. New Jersey residents should be demanding answers.