There are so many of these stories -- women and men can become co-dependent, which is like being addicted to a person. I think we all go through a phase. I remember waiting by the phone for someone to call and checking for a dial tone when the call was late. Buying him sneakers and walking through a rainstorm to deliver them. I am so glad I grew out of that and glad that HE wasn't dangerous because I believe I may have followed him. This reminds me too, of women who get arrested because their guy is dealing and the woman gets 25 years because she has no information to trade. The guy gets out in 2 - 5 - 7. What a tragedy Amanda didn't have a few more years to mature.

From ?Quiet and Sweet? to Death at Gunman?s Side


Amanda G. Anderson, seen here on her 21st birthday, once aspired to be a nurse, her family said.

New York Times
By CHRISTINE HAUSER
Published: July 22, 2009

Like the female counterpart in Bonnie and Clyde, Amanda G. Anderson was a faithful accomplice in crime, who ran from the law with her man and remained at his side in shootouts until the very end.

There she was in a surveillance video, running from a van after its driver was shot in a robbery in Jersey City last month. She appeared in another video gathering up a robe dropped by her partner, Hassian Hosendove (whom she knew by one of his aliases, Hassan Shakur), and holding a door for him as he fired at the police, just before the two were shot dead during a standoff last week in Jersey City.

But a week after the standoff, in which a police officer was fatally injured and four other officers were wounded, many wondered how Ms. Anderson, 22, ended up as a partner in some of the worst violence the town of 240,000 had seen in years.

The Hudson County prosecutor, Edward J. DeFazio, said on Wednesday that Ms. Anderson had no criminal record and had not fired a shot during the July 16 raid.

?But she was literally a partner in crime,? Mr. DeFazio said. ?And we are still, along with other law enforcement agencies, trying to ascertain if they were involved in other criminal activity, in New Jersey and perhaps in other jurisdictions as well.?

Ms. Anderson?s family and acquaintances tried to reconcile their memories of the person they knew, who played in the school orchestra and aspired to be a nurse, with the image of the woman at Mr. Hosendove?s side.

?The last time I heard her voice she called me on my birthday, June 2,? Christerphine Newburn, Ms. Anderson?s mother, said in a telephone interview from Charleston, S.C. By then, Ms. Anderson was in Jersey City, on the run with Mr. Hosendove, who was wanted in South Carolina in connection with a robbery.

?She sounded a little like ? I felt like Hassan was watching her so she did not say the wrong thing,? Mrs. Newburn said. ?We had no idea that it was this bad. I let her know how much we loved her and how worried to death I was for her.?
She said she told her daughter: ???All you have to do is say the word,? and we would come get her. She said that she was fine and that Hassan loved her and she was being taken care of.?

Ms. Anderson was born in Anchorage, Alaska, on Aug. 30, 1986. She later moved with her family to Charleston, and played softball as a child and viola in the West Ashley High School orchestra, before graduating in 2004.

?I remember her as being really sweet and quiet,? said Sarah Fitzgerald, her former music teacher. ?She never gave me an inch of trouble.?

Ms. Anderson eventually moved to Columbia, S.C., where she worked as a barista at a hotel cafe. One day, which her mother believed to be in early 2008, Ms. Anderson stopped for gas, and when she went inside the station to pay, she met Mr. Hosendove, who was buying sweets.

?They were just having fun at first, and they got closer and closer as the months went on,? Mrs. Newburn said.

?The first time we met him, we liked him,? Mrs. Newburn said. ?We did not see any of this. He told us he had been in prison, but we give people a chance. He was working and trying to better himself. To our knowledge, he was.?

In September 2008, Ms. Anderson told her mother she had married Hassan Shakur. At times, he talked about Islam, and Ms. Anderson, who was raised a churchgoing Christian, said she wanted to convert.

?I was not too happy about it, but I was going to support her in whatever she did,? Mrs. Newburn said.

In November 2008, there was a home invasion robbery in Columbia. Mr. Hosendove, 32, who was also known as Hussan Abdus Shakur, became a suspect in March, said Brick Lewis, a police spokesman there. That month, Mr. Hosendove and Ms. Anderson fled South Carolina in the Newburns? Ford Focus. Ms. Anderson said they would return it.

?We gave them time,? Mrs. Newburn said. ?We did not know it was going to be long term.?

Mrs. Newburn and her husband, Donald, informed the police in April that their car had been taken and not returned.
Jersey City police officials said the young couple moved into apartment 3B at 24 Reed Street in Jersey City with a man they had met at a mosque.

Ms. Anderson wore a Muslim headscarf, and kept a low profile. Recordings of what neighbors believed was Koran recitation came from the apartment.

On June 18, the police said, Ms. Anderson was with Mr. Hosendove when he shot the van driver. The police identified a car seen in a surveillance video as the Ford Focus.

Considering the pair to be suspects in the June shooting, the police set up a stakeout at 24 Reed Street on July 16. Around 5 a.m., Ms. Anderson and Mr. Hosendove went to move the car from its parking space. She saw the police. Tossing aside his robe, he took out a 12-gauge shotgun and opened fire before fleeing to the third-floor apartment with Ms. Anderson.
After the police stormed the home, a 90-minute siege and gun battle followed. Ms. Anderson died from a bullet at the base of her skull, Mr. DeFazio said. Mr. Hosendove was shot at least 19 times and also died at the scene.

Mrs. Newburn said she learned her daughter was dead when Mr. Hosendove?s sister called her about 11 a.m.
The Newburns identified the young woman?s body by telephone, describing to the medical examiner in New Jersey her piercings and tattoos, like the cross and beads on her back.

They also e-mailed a photograph to the coroner showing Ms. Anderson smiling broadly next to a cake for her 21st birthday. That is the way she will be remembered, said Mrs. Newburn.
?That is how happy she was. That was her. That smile, those eyes. That is how happy she was, and how our household was,? she said.

=====================

Amanda Anderson, accomplice in Jersey City shootout, met partner in South Carolina

by The Star-Ledger Continuous News Desk
Thursday July 23, 2009, 4:45 AM


This cell phone photo provided by his family shows Hassan Shakur in a March 2009 photo with his wife Amanda Anderson in Columbia, S.C.

Amanda Anderson, the companion and accomplice to Hassan Shakur, who was also killed in the Jersey City shootout last week, was an Alaska native who met Shakur in South Carolina, according to a report in The New York Times.
The report said Anderson, 22, graduated from a Charleston, S.C. high school in 2004 and was a working at a hotel when she met Shakur. Christerphine Newburn, Anderson's mother, told the newspaper the last time she heard from her daughter was June 2.

"We had no idea that it was this bad, Newburn told the newspaper in a telephone interview. "I let her know how much we loved her and how worried to death I was for her."
==========================

'Innocent, naive'-- Amanda Anderson's family says that the actions in Jersey City don't define her life

By Glenn Smith
The Post and Courier
Thursday, July 23, 2009

Amanda Anderson caught her family off guard when she called home to Charleston last month to wish her mother a happy birthday. They hadn't heard from her in months and were worried sick.

Anderson wouldn't say where she was, just that everything was all right.

In 1986, Levonia Middleton flew to Alaska to be with her newborn granddaughter (bottom photo) Amanda Anderson, also shown when she was 2 years old and as a senior at West Ashley High School. Last week, the 22-year-old woman and her husband were killed in a shootout with police in Jersey City, N.J., that also left one officer dead and four officers wounded.

Her family knew better.

Columbia police had been hunting since March for Anderson's husband, Hassan Shakur, a convicted felon wanted for a home invasion robbery. The newly-weds drove off in her stepfather's car and split town shortly after Shakur's name surfaced in the investigation. The car had last been sighted in New Jersey, running through a toll booth without paying.
"I told her, 'I will get in my car right now and drop everything. I am doing to come get you. We love you. We miss you,' " said her mother, Christerphine Newburn. "She said, 'Don't worry. I'm fine.' "

Anderson's family didn't realize the depths of the trouble she was in until July 16, when a police SWAT team burst into an apartment where the couple was staying in Jersey City, N.J.
Shakur, armed with a stolen 12-gauge tactical shotgun, opened fire from 5 feet away as the door swung open. By the time the shooting stopped, five officers were wounded. One later died. Shakur and Anderson also lay dead, cut down by police bullets. She was just 22.

Her family is still struggling to understand how this bright, hardworking young woman, who had never been arrested, unraveled so quickly and ended up in such dire straits.
"Amanda was just an innocent, naive, sweet young lady," said her aunt, Jestine Mathis. "She was as beautiful on the inside as she was on the outside. She just got caught up trusting the wrong person."

Born in Anchorage, Alaska, where her father was stationed in the Air Force, Anderson spent most of her life in the greater Charleston area. She grew up in a tight-knit, church-going family that stressed the value of education and hard work. Her mother and Mathis had gone back to school to earn college degrees after having children.

Anderson followed their lead. As a teenager, she studied hard at West Ashley High School, played the viola, worked as a baby sitter and held jobs at a local veterinarian's office and a restaurant. After graduating in 2004, she enrolled in Trident Technical College with dreams of becoming a nurse.
"I don't think I can recall a time when she wasn't working hard at something," said her grandmother, Levonia Middleton of Moncks Corner.

After a year at Trident Tech, however, Anderson decided to take some time off from school before continuing her studies. She landed a job at Verizon Wireless and moved in with her aunts in Columbia.

It was there that she met Shakur in April 2008. They struck up a conversation at a gas station and hit it off. Five months later, Anderson called her family with surprising news: She and Shakur had gotten married. Her family didn't know what to think.

Ten years her senior, Shakur had a rap sheet dating to 1995, with arrests for dealing crack cocaine, assault and resisting arrest. In 2002, he was arrested by Jersey City police for being a felon in possession of a firearm. Shakur served five years on the charge, and was released in August 2007.

Video

Anderson brought him to Charleston to visit her mother and stepfather. He seemed well-groomed and polite, but he made no secret of his past. One night, Shakur sat her parents down and outlined his criminal record. He told them he had turned over a new leaf and was intent on being a better man. They saw how hard he worked at a ceramic tile business and felt it was important to give him a chance. But they just couldn't shake the feeling something wasn't right about him.

Other family members noticed the same thing. Middleton noticed how Shakur never looked people in the eye when he spoke with them. He appeared restless, always looking away, shaking his leg with nervous energy.

Anderson and Shakur seemed to grow ever closer as time passed and they grew increasingly interested in the Muslim faith, her mother said. Anderson's family sensed she was going through a change. But nothing prepared them for what came next.

One day in March, as Anderson was on the verge of landing a supervisor's job at a Columbia Starbucks, the couple bolted town. Columbia police soon launched a hunt for Shakur, accusing him and another man of robbing several people at gunpoint in November ? just two months after his marriage to Anderson.

Anderson's family heard nothing from her until the June 2 phone call. Her mother sensed from Anderson's manner during the conversation that Shakur was standing close by, monitoring their talk.

Despite her worries, Newburn remained hopeful that her daughter could still walk away from those troubles if she just came home.

The stakes increased June 18, when the couple was implicated in an armed robbery in Jersey City. A man was ambushed and shot in the stomach with a shotgun. The whole thing was captured on a surveillance video and police quickly got calls from people who recognized Anderson and Shakur, authorities said.


Shakur's sister managed to reach him by phone and pleaded with him to surrender. He refused, instead explaining how he wanted to be buried in the Muslim tradition if police found him.
That happened on the morning of July 16 as police moved in on an apartment where the couple had been staying with a junkie who dealt drugs, authorities said. As police approached Shakur, he pulled a pump-action shotgun from under his robe and opened fire. He and Anderson then ran into the apartment building, police said.

The gunbattle that ensued claimed the life of Detective Marc DiNardo, 37, and left one officer seriously wounded.Three others suffered gunshot wounds. Shakur was dead at the scene, with 19 slugs in his body. Anderson, who was unarmed, died from a gunshot wound to the base of the skull.
Newburn said she and her husband still haven't received an official call from Jersey City authorities informing them of their daughter's death. As they plan her memorial service, set for Friday in West Ashley, they are still trying to piece together exactly what happened. But whatever they learn, they refuse to let what happened July 16 define their daughter's life.

"She's not that person you've been reading about. That's not her," Newburn said. "She was just a normal, beautiful girl. I'm just praying she is at peace now