Local Softball Coach Charged With Murder

South Brunswick, NJ - A Long Branch man who has been charged with murdering a Linden woman and burying her body in his backyard has a connection to the South Brunswick area — he used to coach a girls' travel softball league that operated out Monroe Township, but pulled players from South Brunswick and elsewhere.

Up until 2011, Andre Harris, 32, was the coach of the New Jersey Thunder girls travel softball league, a team primarily based out of Monroe Township, but that drew players from South Brunswick and throughout Central New Jersey. Patch previously reported on Harris because he was arrested as the team's coach in 2011 for credit card fraud. The league is made up of girls and women ages 13-23 and they compete up and down the East Coast. Harris used to live in Franklin Park and North Brunswick while he was the Thunder coach, before he moved to Long Branch.

It's the same Andre Harris who was charged Wednesday with killing 41-year-old Tyrita Julius, a Linden woman who had been missing since March. Prosecutors say Harris and another woman, Jennifer Sweeney, 32, Tinton Falls — who police say was a good friend of the victim — wrapped her body in tarp and buried it three feet underground in the backyard of Andre's home at 288 Joline Avenue in Long Branch. Both Harris and Sweeney have been charged with first-degree murder and desecration of human remains.

But Harris didn't have a squeaky clean record when he was coach of the girls' softball team, either.

Between July 1-Aug. 1, 2011, while he was coach of the team, he used a stolen California woman's Discover card to pay for $10,000 of hotel rooms for the team at the Swan and Dolphin Hotel in Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, police said. The Thunder was competing in a tournament in Orlando at that time.

He also used the stolen card to make payments to T-Mobile and Cablevision, former Somerset County Prosecutor Geoffrey Soriano said at the time. Harris, then 28, was arrested and charged with credit card fraud. He stepped down as coach shortly after his arrest, which was reported in the South Brunswick Patch.

Somerset County law enforcement made the arrest in 2011 because they said Harris was living in Franklin Park when he made the hotel reservations on the stolen card.

At the time, prosecutors said the New Jersey Thunder was privately-owned and operated in South Brunswick. But Lee Brancaccio, the Director of Softball in South Brunswick, told Patch back in 2011 that Harris had no involvement with softball in town.

"There may be a couple girls from South Brunswick who play on the team, but they are based out of Monroe and based out of the Monroe softball complex," Brancaccio said. "I don't think (the Thunder) even played in our tournament in the last four years. In the past couple years, I know one or two girls from South Brunswick who left the team for multiple reasons. (Harris) has absolutely nothing to do with South Brunswick softball."

Monroe Township Recreation Director Tom Morris told TAP Into this week that the privately owned travel softball teams were not affiliated with the township or its recreation programs.

Story first reported in Tap Into South Brunswick. Photo of Andre Harris released in 2011 by the Somerset County Prosecutor's Office.