Criminal cases · Woodland Township, Burlington County
Eric Pagan’s body burned in Woodland Township and the 2013 sentences
Resolved; both defendants pleaded guilty and were sentenced in February 2013
Eric Pagan, 37, of Ocean Grove was beaten to death at a house in Brick in 2010 and his body burned in a rural part of Woodland Township; a Brick couple were sentenced to prison in February 2013.
What the record establishes
Eric Pagan, a 37-year-old man from Ocean Grove, was killed in 2010 at the Brick Township home of Gregory Elk and Susan Vasikonis. According to Ocean County prosecutors, as reported by the Associated Press, Pagan had come to the house to sell the couple heroin; he and Elk began fighting, and Elk beat him fatally with a hammer. Elk and Vasikonis then drove Pagan’s body to a rural area of Woodland Township, in Burlington County, and set it on fire.
The Pine Barrens part of this case is therefore a disposal site rather than a scene: a man killed at a house on the coastal side of Ocean County and carried inland into the woods of Burlington County. The precise spot in Woodland Township is not identified in the source opened for this entry, and the address in Brick is deliberately not given here.
Pleas and sentences
Gregory Elk, of Brick, pleaded guilty in November 2012 to aggravated manslaughter. Susan Vasikonis, his live-in girlfriend, pleaded guilty the following month to desecrating human remains. Both were sentenced on a Friday in February 2013: Elk, then 48, to 15 years in state prison, and Vasikonis, then 44, to a five-year term.
What could not be re-verified
This entry has been cut back substantially. An earlier draft carried a detailed account of the discovery — a specific date in February 2010, a call reported as a brush fire, a location “off Route 532,” a medical examiner’s finding that Pagan was dead before the fire was set, an arrest at a motel in Greencastle, Pennsylvania, a named Superior Court judge and a bail figure. All of that rested on two NJ.com articles that had been obtained through a third-party text-extraction proxy rather than from the publisher. Both were requested directly this session and both returned HTTP 403; neither could be opened, and no independent copy could be located. Every claim that depended on them has been removed.
The consequences are worth stating plainly. The date the body was found is not established here. The claim that the site lay off Route 532 is not established here, and the title and map pin for this entry no longer assert it. Whether a medical examiner determined that Pagan was already dead when the fire was lit is not established here, though the Associated Press account of the plea is consistent with it. The circumstances of the arrest, the judge, and the bail are not established here.
No court record was examined. A search of CourtListener’s New Jersey Appellate Division collection returned nothing for either defendant, but that collection is incomplete for state criminal appeals and the absence proves little. Whether either sentence carried a period of parole ineligibility, and whether either was later appealed or modified, is not established here; the New Jersey Department of Corrections offender search was blocked by a bot-challenge page and could not be queried.
Sources and research limits
- CBS Philadelphia, “New Jersey Couple Sentenced For Role In Burned Body Case” (Associated Press, February 2013) — full article text retrieved directly this session. This is the sole source for everything asserted above: both names, both ages, both guilty pleas and their dates, both charges, both sentences, the victim’s name, age and home town, the hammer, the heroin sale at the couple’s home, and the drive to Woodland Township. Limits: it is a short AP wire item of a few hundred words, it attributes its account of the killing to Ocean County prosecutors rather than to the court record, it names no judge, and it gives no docket number.
- Two NJ.com reports — a February 2010 story on the discovery and a February 2013 story on the sentencing — were cited in an earlier draft, having been obtained through a text-extraction proxy. Both returned HTTP 403 when requested directly this session. They are listed here only to record that they were relied on before and can no longer be verified; they are not cited as sources for anything in this entry.
- CourtListener, New Jersey Superior Court Appellate Division opinion collection — searched this session for both surnames and for the victim’s name; no matching opinion. A negative result from an incomplete collection.