Navy vet a victim of 'senseless violence'

Not just in Patterson, New Jersey: That’s just the way things go.

Let’s stick together, whatever our differences, to meet what life brings after service, and to honor a man like Frank Wilborn

Paterson, New Jersey — Frank Wilborn fought for his country during wartime and lived to tell about it.

But he couldn’t survive the war back home on the streets of Paterson.

Wilborn, a recently discharged U.S. Navy veteran, was shot to death Saturday morning when two men burst through the door of an apartment on Ryle Avenue in Paterson.

First they took his money, then they took his life, pumping two shots into his chest as his girlfriend watched in horror, police said.

After being hit, Wilborn ‘was either thrown out or jumped out the window,’ and then crashed to the pavement below before crawling a few feet up the street. He later died at St. Joseph ’s Regional Medical Center in Paterson , said Lt. Det. Ronald Humphrey, a Paterson police spokesman.

Officially, Wilborn became the twelfth homicide victim in Paterson this year — and the third within the past week.

He was killed only two months after he came home from the Navy, with dreams of becoming a Paterson cop, his family said.

‘We were afraid something like this could happen,’ his stepfather, Mark Hickman, said Saturday afternoon, as the family received mourners at the family home on Burhans Avenue.

‘We didn’t want him to come back to Paterson because of all these senseless killings that are going on. I guess he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’

Wilborn came home in July after a three-year stint with the U.S. Navy. He was stationed in Guam, where he worked as a military policeman. He hoped his military training might provide the foundation for a career in law enforcement, his stepfather said.

‘He wanted to be a cop, and he planned to take the Civil Service exam in January,’ Hickman said. ‘He was an all-around good kid.’

Wilborn had taken a job at Benjamin Moore paints in Clifton , working the second shift just to put a few dollars in his pocket. He’d met a girl three weeks ago, the family said, and the two had struck up a relationship.

He came home from work around 11 p.m. Friday and then went out with his uncle. Around 3:30 a.m., Wilborn’s new girlfriend sent a text message to the uncle saying that she was hungry.

Wilborn stopped at the all-night McDonald’s on Broadway in Paterson and brought some hamburgers over to her apartment at 35 Ryle Avenue. He was at the apartment around 7:30 a.m., when two men knocked down the door of the first-floor apartment, police said.

Humphrey said it appears that robbery was the motive. A scuffle ensued and shots rang out. Wilborn was hit and was either tossed out or fell out of the window. He crashed to the pavement below. The two suspects, both males, fled and are still at large, police said. The family says they learned of the murder when a knock came at the door of their Burhans Avenue home on Saturday morning. It was the cousin of Wilborn’s girlfriend.

By Saturday afternoon, a crowd of neighbors and family members had gathered at the house to mourn and console.

Hickman, clutching the hand of the victim’s mother, Keisha, recalled how the couple had mixed feelings when Wilborn came home in July.

‘She [Keisha] didn’t want him to reenlist in the Navy because there’s a war going on,’ Hickman said.’But we were also worried about him coming home to Paterson . But there was nowhere else to go.’