This was not the only murder to occur in the city that day or week but it had all of the familiar headline-grabbing elements: an attractive young white woman with promise – in this case an aspiring actress and playwright -- was allegedly killed by a faceless, nameless band of black teens in a robbery gone awry.

The Spring 2005 Advanced Honors Reporting Class at New York University decided to go beyond the headlines to examine the underlying factors that contributed to that fatal encounter.

The articles that follow examine the main characters involved in the tragedy; crime and gentrification on the Lower East Side; the alarming high school dropout and incarceration rates of New York City’s black youth; the despair so pervasive in communities like the one where the primary suspect lived; and the widening disparities between New York's rich and poor; black and white.