John Taylor, an employee of Montclair’s Glenridge Avenue Post Office and associate pastor of Lighthouse Temple Church in Newark, has spoken at the memorial all but a handful of times through the years, he told The Montclair Times. Taylor said that he anticipates speaking about the tragedy followed by the reading of scripture and prayers on Saturday. (2011 ceremony photo)
“I think we’re in mourning,” Teresa Elliot, a commuter using the Watchung Avenue Train Station, told The Montclair Times 20 years ago this week. “It doesn’t seem real.”
Elliot’s comments came just hours after a quadruple homicide in the Watchung Plaza Post Office left two postal workers, Ernest Spruill and Stanley Scott Walensky, and two customers, George Lomaga and Robert Leslie, dead, and a third customer, David Grossman, wounded on March 21, 1995.
The annual memorial ceremony will be held this Saturday at 4:30 p.m. in Watchung Plaza Park.