NEWARK — The "smile that could light up a room" was the last gesture 18-year-old Reginald Terry made to the world, before the college freshman died of a gunshot wound on a Newark sidewalk early Saturday morning, neighbors said.

Terry was shot and killed around 1:15 a.m. on Saturday, during an altercation near Washington and Market streets in Newark, according to a spokeswoman for the Essex County Prosecutor's Office. The investigation was continuing, but the spokeswoman, Kathy Carter, said Terry may have been an innocent victim struck by a stray bullet.

Less than a mile away, outside the High Park Terrace apartment complex on Court Street, where Terry lived with his mother, neighbors said he was a respectful young man, always eager to help elderly residents or talk about business, which he studied as a freshman at New Jersey City University. A scholar-athlete, Terry graduated in June from Newark’s University High School and had been a standout on the Central High School Blue Devils football team, where he played because University, a college preparatory magnet school, does not have a team.

“He was a kid anybody would be proud to call his son,” said Stuart Manuel, a maintenance worker at the apartment complex, whose own son, Stephon, was killed in a car crash at age 16. “He was known, he was liked. He would help anybody anytime, elderly people.”

But most of all, people remembered Terry’s electrifying grin.

“The thing I remember was his smile,” said Carolyn Freeman, 24, who like other neighbors knew the amiable teenager as Reggie. “Always smiling. He had a smile that could light up a room.”

Neighbors said Terry and his mother, Leandra Davis, moved into the apartment about six years ago, after she and the boy’s father separated and moved out of the house on Arverne Terrace in Irvington where Reggie had grown up.

“The little kid loved to play basketball, him and his father,” said Helena Clark, who lives across the street from the house. She and other neighbors did not know where Reggie’s father was living.

His mother did not answer the door at her apartment on Monday. Neighbors said Terry chose to attend college in Jersey City so that he could commute to school while continuing to live with his mother, who they said worked at Red Bull Arena in Harrison.

Ali McKinnon, another maintenance worker at High Park Terrace, said he spoke to Davis after police had told her of her son’s shooting, when they described his attempt to flee gunfire that erupted as he and a friend stood on the sidewalk. According to McKinnon, Davis said her son, who had had been shot in the head, was still was alive when police arrived at the scene.

“The cop said, ‘If you hear me, squeeze my hand,’” McKinnon said, recounting what Davis told him of the officers' account. “And he squeezed his hand and smiled. And when he smiled, he died.”

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