One had his sights set on becoming an assistant district attorney in Manhattan. The other had just met with an editor about a novel he had written.

Yevgeniy Marshalik and Nicholas Pekearo volunteered every week as unarmed auxiliary police officers in Greenwich Village, according to friends, relatives, and co-workers interviewed yesterday, and both were murdered on Wednesday night. A police lieutenant called them “really good kids.”

Their killer was an ex-Marine, a recently fired bartender who went berserk on the busy, restaurant-lined streets below Washington Square Park, killing a waiter at DeMarco’s Restaurant and Pizzeria and the two officers before police killed him.

These are the facts that Mayor Bloomberg at 2 a.m. yesterday called “inexplicable,” after the second straight night of violence against city police officers. Seven officers were assaulted over 48 hours, including an officer who was stabbed through his skull into his brain by a man in a subway station.

Marshalik, a 19-year-old New York University sophomore who went by the name Eugene, was the second victim on Wednesday night. The killer, David Garvin, shot him in the back of the head at close range just minutes after firing 15 rounds into the back of the waiter, Alfredo Romero, 35.

Marshalik had been an auxiliary police officer for 14 months. Besides studying for an economics degree, he worked as a part-time elevator operator at the Olympic Tower apartment building in Midtown.

“I was very impressed when I first met him,” the head concierge at the building, Caryl Hock, said. “I could tell he was nervous but he was professional. He looked great, which is more than I can say about most college students.”

Marshalik was born in Pytigorsk, Russia, near Chechnya, but his family fled because of the violence there, a cousin, Tatyana Kochergina, 21, said.

After excelling in school in Brooklyn, where his father had set up a medical practice, he was accepted at Stuyvesant High School. He led the school’s debate club.

“We were all a crew from junior high school,” a friend and student at McGill University, Jacob Feygin, said. “We spoke Russian quite rarely. We tried to stay away from that — a big part of our friendship was this thing we had about universality.”

The friends would take trips to the New York Public Library and argue over philosophy. A favorite discussion topic was a Slovenian theorist, Slavoj Zizek, whose radical thinking they admired, but since coming to college Mr. Feygin had begun calling Marshalik “commissioner,” because of his interest in policing.

“Better me than someone else,” Marshalik would say, Mr. Feygin recalled.

Pekearo, 28, the third victim of Garvin’s attacks, seemed to have a knack for calming situations, the manager of the Upper East Side book store where he worked, Thomas Talbot, said.

“It was a big thing that if there was any kind of disagreement between people in the store he would try to smooth it out,” Mr. Talbot said. The bookstore is Crawford Doyle at 1082 Madison Ave. His girlfriend, who he lived with in Brooklyn, also worked there.

He had been an auxiliary officer for three years. Garvin shot him six times in the back, shoulder, and side.

Pekearo grew up in the West Village, where neighbors remember him playing soccer in the street and going to the movie theater with the other kids.

“He was absolutely an angel kid, gorgeous,” a family friend and neighbor, Indra Kaushal, said.

Pekearo had recently finished a novel and was excited about meeting an editor last week. He enjoyed writing about nature and read many crime novels by authors like Andrew Vachss, friends said.

Not long before the shooting, Mr. Talbot said, Pekearo had a brief meeting with his girlfriend, Christina, on the street. Her last name was not known. Mr. Talbot said the memory of the meeting stayed with her during her first night alone.

“She’s been up all night, she’s very distraught,” he said. “She said a lot of things, but she was focusing on that he was doing something he wanted to do.”

A lieutenant outside the 9th Precinct said the men were both on track to becoming regular police officers. Pekearo was close to lining up his college credits and Marshalik was mulling the department as a career option.

“Everybody’s down,” the lieutenant said. “Especially when it’s two really good kids.”