It was a friendship that brought a New Jersey couple, the Mazzellas, from the Poconos to a quiet neighborhood in North Carolina, and an untimely death that friends and family struggle to understand.
WAKE FOREST, N.C.--It seemed the closest of friendships.
Eight years ago, New Jersey transplants Stephenie and Sandy Mazzella headed south to North Carolina, settling in this fast-growing suburb of new tract housing and green lawns--fields of opportunity for Sandy's landscaping business. He urged Jon Sander--a stone mason by trade who he had known since meeting him in the Poconos years earlier--to join them. Not just to work the business with him, but to move into the house next door.
There were backyard cookouts, trips together and shared laughter. And there was money to be made.
But something happened, turning that closeness into a growing and menacing darkness between two men, that ended in shocking violence on Good Friday when authorities say Jon Sander, 52, walked across the yard with a loaded shotgun to the home of his one-time friend.
The blast of the shotgun echoed through the neighborhood.
And then there were several more loud shots in succession. When it was over, Stephenie, 43, and Sandy, 47, were dead on the floor, along with Sandy's 76-year-old mother, Elaine Toby Mazzella. On a police 911 tape, a frantic voice, believed to be the couple's 14-year-old daughter from inside the house, could be heard crying out frantically: "My parents have been shot!"
And as friends and family gathered for a wake and the funeral on Friday morning, there was only one question on their minds.
Why?
"We keep saying to ourselves, 'What could be so bad to motivate someone to do this?'" said Cindy Frommelt, a lifelong friend of Stephenie.
Sander, meanwhile, is being held on capital murder charges that could bring him the death penalty."Something happened where three people wound up dead," his attorney told reporters. "A lot of facts have not been delved into yet."
JERSEY ROOTS
The Mazzellas both grew up in New Jersey. Sandy's family lived in New Milford, a low-key bedroom community of old colonials and Cape Cods in Bergen County. Stephenie Kern was from Jefferson Township, the northernmost township in Morris County, where parades down Weldon Road once kicked off the annual Jefferson Township Day each summer. She went to Bloomfield College, and then to Felician College, where she got her nursing license, before landing a job as an RN at Clara Maas Medical Center in Belleville.
Stephenie, who played flute in high school marching band, was a Bon Jovi fan. Friends said the she and Sandy met while they were both out one night clubbing in West Orange. Married in a ceremony at the Newark Airport Marriott about 18 years ago, the newlyweds settled down for a time in a small place in Belleville, just a short walk to the hospital where Stephenie worked.
With housing prices far cheaper in the Poconos, the couple left New Jersey in 2002. Records show they bought a home on a 1-acre lot in East Stroudsburg, Pa., for $155,000 and Sandy soon started up a landscaping business, All Turf Mowing & Landscaping. A daughter was born; then a son.
According to family members, it was there where they met Sander. He also lived in East Stroudsburg and the two men did work together, said those who knew them. Sandy would handle the landscaping. Jon would do the stonework, with examples of his patios and brickwork still posted on his Facebook page.
Sander, though, had money troubles. Filing for bankruptcy in 2005, he listed $167,210 in liabilities against just $26,060 in assets, including $60 in the bank, a 1978 Mercedes 450 SL that was not running, a dump truck with a blown engine and a 1995 Cadillac Seville. He emerged from the bankruptcy in April 2006.
Fears of violence before a shooting
Meanwhile, by 2008, the Mazzellas had decided to pull up stakes and leave the cold weather of the northeast. They moved with the kids to Wake Forest, buying a new house on a cul-de-sac on Richland Bluff Court for $279,000--a 4 bedroom, 3 bath home with a custom kitchen, granite countertops and a guest suite on the main level. Carrying a $251,000 mortgage on the house, Sandy started a new landscaping business, Advanced Mowing and Landscaping. Stephenie found a job as a nurse in the intensive care unit of WakeMed Health & Hospitals, about a half hour drive in Raleigh.
Pastor Mike Fry during a eulogy at the funeral service on Friday at Richland Creek Community Church, joked that when Sandy moved from the Poconos to North Carolina, he brought his snowblower with him. "He probably used that thing once a year," Fry said.
Sandy Mazzella's parents, Salvatore and Elaine, soon joined their son and daughter-in-law in North Carolina to be closer to their grandchilden.
"Sandy was always trying to get everybody to move down here," said Meredith Galluzzo, a childhood friend of Stephenie from Jefferson, who came for the funeral. "Stephenie loved it here. She loved her job. She loved her husband. She would do anything for her children."
A NEW START
Mazzella dressed up the new house, creating what one neighbor called "a landscape showroom" with a huge koi pond that drew lots of frogs, banana leaf palms, a waterfall, a fireplace, all framed with big berms planted with flowers. But like his friend, Mazzella soon came under financial pressure himself, filing for bankruptcy in North Carolina in 2009. The Mazzellas listed $371,717 in liabilities, including $58,955 in credit card debt. Most of their assets were represented by the house. His bankruptcy was finally discharged a year later, in January 2010.
Several friends of the Mazzellas said Sandy began trying to get Sander to come to North Carolina and he ultimately moved in with the family at some point in 2014, according to neighbors.
Few in the neighborhood willing to talk could say they liked Sander. He parked a broken-down Jaguar in the Mazzella's driveway and was described by Lenika Banks, a teacher who lived in the cul-de-sac, as "creepy." At some point, Banks said Sandy approached the owner of the house next door to his when he found out that it was available, asked if his friend from Pennsylvania could rent it. The owner turned him down.
Some of the cul-de-sac neighbors also did not like Sandy, complaining about his practice of parking landscape trucks and his RV on the street. "They would have lots of trucks and vans and things and people had an issue with it," said Banks. "It was a nuisance."
They also expressed displeasure over Mazzella allowing some of his workers to move into his home for weeks or months at a time. One neighbor, who would not give his name, said Sandy often sat outside with the workers, many of them smoking, taking loudly or sunning themselves. "This is a very quiet street. It just got disturbing after awhile," said the neighbor.
Another, though, said some of the neighbors were "horrible and disgusting" to Sandy and Stephenie. "The Mazzellas would do anything for anybody. They would give you the shirts off their backs," she said.
CLOSE FRIENDS
In October 2014, Sander finally found a rental house about 10 minutes away on Clearsprings Drive, nestled in a wooded area on an isolated street of mostly new homes and entered into a $1,725 monthly lease for the property. And for reasons none of the friends or family can explain, the Mazzellas soon sold their home on the cul-de-sac for a loss in September 2015 for $258,000, and soon moved into the rental house adjacent to Sanders.
Jim Prassos, who lives across from the Mazzella home, thought the two men were good friends. He remembers children splashing in Sander's backyard pool and lots of laughter and music playing. "You would hear them talking back and forth from their yards. But I never heard any arguments, never heard any fighting," Prassos recalled.
Sometime after January of this year, however, the friendship abruptly soured.
Court records paint a deteriorating relationship after a lawsuit was filed against Sander and Mazzella on Feb. 17 for failing to complete a $6,750 landscaping job in Wake Forest.
After the lawsuit was filed, the plaintiffs in the lawsuit heard from Sandy Mazzella, according to sources who did not want to be identified. Sandy told the plaintiffs that he would appear in court to support their effort to get their money back, the sources said. Sandy also told the plaintiffs he feared Sander, according to the sources, and that he asked the judge to have a sheriff's deputy present in court during a hearing. Sander, however, did not show up in court.
The tensions apparently escalated in late February.
Sander was charged on Feb. 26 with allegedly threatening to kill Sandy Mazzella and "put him in a box." In a request for a restraining order, Mazzella listed personal threats, as well as threatening text messages and phone calls. He said Sander reportedly told him that the "cops could not protect him."
Sander filed a small claims lawsuit against Mazzella on March 2, seeking $9,600 he claimed to have loaned Mazzella to purchase a 2009 Corvette, a 2009 Cadillac and furniture.
Sander's attorney, Alan Briones, told reporters "there's a long history between the two families," but declined to discuss details of the dispute.
Sander was ordered not to threaten, assault or harass Mazzella, but the temporary restraining order expired a day before the shootings.
Nicole Privette, who lives across the street, said she did not know either Sander or the Mazzellas, but could tell things were escalating in recent weeks. She started hearing loud music during the day from the Mazzella home. She contacted a family member in law enforcement who looked into it, and told her it was "just two neighbors trying to annoy each other." She also heard angry shouting from time to time.
A week before the murder, Sander allegedly came back to Sandy's old house on Richland Bluff Court to tell the new owners who had purchased the property that Mazzella had not disclosed things that were wrong with the property, according to a neighbor who asked not to be identified. Sander reportedly pointed out that Sandy filled in the koi pond with dirt and now the front yard is beginning to sink, and that the controls for the landscaping lights had been removed.
A DEADLY ENDING
On the day of the shootings, the shouting on Clearsprings Drive was louder than it had been in the past. Privette said she saw Sander's girlfriend in a red Cadillac parked in their shared driveway, and heard Sander yell to her to block Mazzella's landscraping truck from leaving.
"They were yelling loud enough for us to hear them from inside our house," Privette said. "But then the Sheriff's Department showed up and things seemed to calm down."
That evening, she left her house at 4:20 p.m. with her husband and kids to go to movies. They last saw Jon Sander walking in the road, looking at his cell phone, as he stood in front of the Mazzella house. According to Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison, Sander entered the Mazzella home shortly before 6 p.m. Friday night, and began shooting.
Stephenie's brother, Joey, was outside walking the dogs when the killings occurred, and was one of those who first called 911.
"My sister and brother-in-law are laying on the floor," he could be heard on a tape released by authorities.
"Is anybody awake or breathing?" the dispatcher asked.
"No," the caller said. "They got shot-gunned. They're done."
Staff writer Ted Sherman and researcher Vinessa Erminio contributed to this report
Anthony G. Attrino may be reached at tattrino@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TonyAttrino. Find NJ.com on Facebook.