Solved cold cases in New Jersey
2 documented cases.
Jennifer Persia
Jennifer Lynne Persia, a 16-year-old sophomore at Sterling High School, was beaten, bound at the neck with a ligature, and stabbed more than 20 times in her family home in Magnolia, Camden County, New Jersey, on April 4, 1994. DNA collected at the scene never matched a known suspect, and the case went cold for more than three decades. In 2025 New Jersey State Police re-tested clothing from the 1993 murder of 24-year-old Marebeth Welsh; the resulting male DNA profile matched the unknown blood profile from Persia's scene, linking the two killings. Investigative genetic genealogy and kinship DNA testing of relatives identified Francis T. Schooley, a Mantua Township man who had done construction work for Persia's stepfather and who died by suicide in 2000 at age 39, as the source of the DNA in both cases. Because Schooley was dead, no prosecution was possible; the Camden County Prosecutor's Office announced the findings on April 9, 2026.
Nadal Haq
On March 30, 1997, in the South Paterson section of Paterson, New Jersey, Nadal Haq was shot to death execution-style and a second man, Isaam Atsham, was killed later the same day, with a third man, Adnan Ali, wounded in the leg. The weapon was a .38 caliber handgun. What made the case historic was not how it was investigated on the street but how the gun itself was traced: investigators ran the ballistic evidence from the Paterson shootings through the Essex County Sheriff's Integrated Ballistics Identification System (IBIS), an early computerized ballistics database, and the system matched the Paterson casings and bullets to a separate execution-style killing thirteen days earlier in New Britain, Connecticut, where a restaurant owner had been shot during a robbery. It was the first time IBIS had ever linked a New Jersey crime to an out-of-state crime, and the firearms match tied the same gun, and ultimately the same shooter, Gino Gentile, to both scenes. On February 19, 2000, Gentile was convicted of murder in what authorities describe as the nation's first case to obtain a murder conviction using IBIS-generated ballistics evidence. He was sentenced to 40 years for the two Paterson homicides and was later convicted in the Connecticut killing and sentenced to 100 years.