IRVINGTON — The teenager accused of shooting five people, three of them fatally, at an Irvington go-go bar after he was denied access to the club early Christmas morning was arrested at his mother's home in Florida today, authorities said.
Anthony Fields, 19, was captured by the FBI in Orlando and charged with three counts of murder and two counts of aggravated assault after prosecutors said he was the lone gunman in the shooting outside of Slick’s Go-Go bar, said Anthony Ambrose, chief of detectives for the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office.
Fields was arrested without incident around 6:30 a.m., Ambrose said, and will be held on $2 million bail when he is extradited to New Jersey.
"The prosecutor would like to thank our federal partners in working with the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office to apprehend Fields and start the judicial process," Ambrose said in a statement.
Fields was intoxicated and carrying a firearm when he tried to enter the club about 12:45 a.m. Dec. 25, according to prosecutors and relatives.
A dispute erupted between Fields and bouncer Woodley Daniel, 32, relatives said. When Pierre Clervoyant Jr., a manager at Slick’s and son of the club’s owner, tried to calm things down Fields began shooting, according to police and relatives.
Clervoyant Jr., 34, Daniel and Mushir Cureton, 27, were killed.
"He (Clervoyant) was trying to be the peacemaker," Stephanie Clervoyant, 25, told The Star-Ledger hours after the shooting.
Two other people were injured, but Ambrose said they have recovered and may have been released from University Hospital in Newark.
It remains unclear how many shots Fields fired, and police have not recovered a weapon, according to Ambrose. Attempts to contact relatives of Clervoyant and Fields were unsuccessful.
Fields’ arrest marked the end of a series of investigations by the prosecutor’s office into several unrelated killings across Essex County during the holiday season.
A 30-year-old Hoboken attorney was killed in front of his wife during a carjacking at the Mall at Short Hills in Millburn on Dec. 15, and an 18-year-old college student was cut down by a stray bullet the next weekend in Newark.
Less than 24 hours after the shooting at Slick’s, two Newark teenagers were gunned down, including a 13-year-old girl who was killed by a stray bullet as she was taking out the trash, prosecutors said.
The killings marked the end of a bloody year in Essex County, where there were 144 homicides in 2013, a 20 percent increase from the year before.
Ambrose said there were at least nine incidents during which more than one person was killed, which helped drive the increase.
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