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By Victoria St. Martin and Julia Terruso/The Star-Ledger

Seventeen-year-old Jose Pacheco Holley sometimes missed his 11 p.m. curfew.

Usually his dad, Darryl Holley, didn’t think anything of it, but on Friday night he walked outside to look for his son because something just didn’t feel right.

Then the phone rang.

"It was a friend calling, saying my son had been stabbed," Darryl Holley said.

Authorities said the Rahway teen, who was going to be a senior at his city’s high school this fall, was killed during a large fight on Donald Avenue -- about a mile from his home.

Rahway police were called to the street of well-kept homes and lawns after midnight Friday, after reports of brawling were called in to dispatchers, according to a press release from the Union CountyProsecutor’s Office.

Officers found Holley suffering from stab wounds and rushed him to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital at Rahway, where the teen died from his injuries at 12:37 a.m. Saturday.

Investigators have not made any arrests in the killing and are unclear how many people were involved or what prompted the fight, Union County Prosecutor Theodore J. Romankow said in a release.

As an autopsy was under way and police continued to gather statements Saturday, Holley’s father sat at the family’s dining room table. He was looking at framed photographs of his son and reminiscing about the first time he saw the boy.

"His face just stood out — his eyes and his mouth," Darryl Holley said of the child he adopted as a single father after years of fostering him.