Virginia Man Is Charged in Fatal Shooting of New Jersey Councilwoman

A 28-year-old Virginia man was charged with murder on Tuesday in the fatal shooting of a New Jersey council member in February, the authorities said.

The man, Rashid Ali Bynum, was taken into custody in Virginia on Tuesday morning and was awaiting extradition, Yolanda Ciccone, the Middlesex County, New Jersey, prosecutor said at a news conference. He was charged with first-degree murder, second-degree unlawful possession of a handgun and second-degree possession of a handgun for an unlawful purpose.

Ciccone said at the news conference that the slain woman, Eunice K. Dwumfour, 30, had a number associated with Bynum in her cellphone contacts, indicating that Dwumfour might have known the man charged with killing her.

But Ciccone did not offer a motive for the killing and declined to take questions at the news conference.

Dwumfour was shot while she was in her car outside the complex of apartment buildings and duplexes where she lived in Parlin, an unincorporated section of Sayreville, New Jersey, just before 7:30 p.m. on Feb. 1, authorities said.

The car rolled down a steep incline before crashing into two cars at the bottom of the hill, police said. Officers responding to reports of a shooting found Dwumfour with several gunshot wounds, and she was pronounced dead at the scene, authorities said.

Dwumfour, a Republican, was in her first three-year term as a Sayreville council member at the time of her death, having narrowly defeated an incumbent Democrat to win her seat in 2021. She was the first Black person ever elected to office in Sayreville.

In a statement about her campaign posted on the Sayreville Republican Party’s website, she said she loved the borough, which has a population of about 45,000 and is about 30 miles south of Manhattan in Middlesex County, and wanted to help improve the lives of its residents.

“I am fully dedicated to building a better, stronger Sayreville,” she wrote. “And with your support, we can create a brighter future for our wonderful town.”

Dwumfour graduated from Newark public schools and received a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies from William Paterson University of New Jersey in 2017. Her career included jobs as a business analyst and professional scrum master, a type of project manager, according to a LinkedIn profile that was active at the time of her death.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/30/nyregion/eunice-dwumfour-killing-arrest-nj.html">The New York Times</a>.