by Gabe Donio

It’s pretty comforting, in some small way, to know that after 11 years on this job I can still count the number of local murders I’ve covered on one hand.
This week, I was reminded of one of those murders when a dead body turned up behind Pike Wine & Liquors on the White Horse Pike (Route 30) on April 20. The name of the 43-year-old Hispanic man was not released as police attempted to notify his next-of-kin, but another name immediately sprung into my head: Martinez Colon.
According to police, the body found on April 20 was located in the same area where police found the broken body of Martinez Colon on July 11, 2006.
Police said he was killed on his birthday.
Colon had been viciously beaten, and left to die behind the liquor store.
On his birthday. In his hometown.
The area had been — and, judging by the freshly-drunk bottles strewn about the grass behind bushes and under trees when I drove back there on April 21, still is — an area where drifters and homeless people hung out and got drunk. Apparently, a little less than two years ago, someone had become violent, and had beaten Colon to death.
That murder has never been solved. We wrote about it on our front page and in an editorial. A follow-up column appeared in this space on the anniversary of the murder in 2007. Few people seemed to care.
“We’ll do this again next year,” I wrote then.
I didn’t think that I would be writing about Colon again so soon. I didn’t think another dead man would be found behind the store on the highway, a short drive from the high school and a nice residential neighborhood.
According to police, it doesn’t appear that this second death was a murder. While autopsy results haven’t been received, police said there didn’t appear to be signs of foul play.
So there is no connection, apparently. It’s just a coincidence, apparently.
This past Monday, as I looked out at the site where both men died, filled with those empty bottles and overgrowth, one connection did come to mind: the place where both of them died is a disgrace.
It’s a bad area of town, and now not one, but two, men have died there.
Maybe it’s time to cut back the undergrowth, and make the place more like the open field directly behind it. Maybe the bottles should be thrown away, and maybe some police patrols should roll back there on a more regular basis to make sure no one is hanging out in the bushes.
Someone should clean this place up, and keep it clean. It’s up to the property owner and the town to make it happen. There was an effort made to clean up the area around the time Colon was murdered.
It’s obvious, like solving his murder, that cleaning up the place where he and the other man died has not been a top priority.
But it should be.
Here’s hoping we don’t have to do this again next year.

Gabe Donio is the publisher of The Gazette.