TOWN WATCH
NEWARK – “Local Talk” is among those waiting to hear the results of a Feb. 6 New Jersey Superior Court-Newark hearing regarding the April 15 school board election ballot.
Outside attorney Scott Salmon, representing the Newark City Clerk’s Office, has asked the court to add on the school board election ballot a place for the unexpired Central Ward Council Member term. Salmon had filed for the incorporation as an injunction Jan. 15 against the Essex County Clerk, Essex County Board of Elections and the Newark Public Schools Board of Education.
The county clerk, board of elections and the Newark and Irvington public schools hold annual April elections for their board of education and school budgets. The City of Newark, through Salmon and the clerk’s office, wants an election to succeed now-Congresswoman LaMonica McIver as soon as possible.
LaMonica resigned as Newark Municipal Council President Sept. 18 and as Central Ward Councilwoman Jan. 6 after winning a Sept. 18 special election to fill the late Congressman Donald Payne, Jr.’s unexpired term and the Nov. 5 General Election for a full two year term.
McIver, however, has left for the House of Representatives in New Jersey’s 10th Congressional District – and with 18 months left on her ward council term as of press time. The city, through Salmon, is arguing that state law requires a special election to any vacant term with at least 12 months left on it.
The Municipal Council, until the Central Ward vacancy is filled, is at eight members. Those eight can arrive at a 4-4 tie vote, which would send a measure to technical defeat. Mayor Ras Baraka, the way Newark’s Mayor-Council is structured, cannot cast a tie-breaking vote. State superior and appellate courts ruled in 2012-13 that then-Mayor Cory A. Booker should not have cast a vote in an attempt to fill a council seat with now-State Assemblywoman Shanique Speight. Salmon – a partner in the Florham Park Jardim, Meisner, Salmon, Sprague and Susser law firm – was hired by the city as an outside special counsel.
The Superior Court Judge’s ruling would either allow a partisan elected position to go on a nonpartisan school board election ballot – or prompt the Newark Democratic Committee to either file for a separate Central Ward council election and/or appoint an interim council member until May 2026.
IRVINGTON / MAPLEWOOD – Irvington native Robert F. Noesner, 82, was given a Funeral Mass at Maplewood’s St. Joseph Church, up the street where he had been a 47-year resident, Jan. 14. His remains were interred at Kenilworth’s Graceland Memorial Park. He died at home, surrounded by his family, Jan. 11.
Noesner, who moved to 719 Prospect St. in Maplewood’s College Hill section in 1978, commuted to Union as a 25-year firefighter there. He retired to become Maplewood’s fire inspector.
Noesner was born in Irvington General Hospital in 1942, where a mystery exists. He and his family were not found in either township’s real estate and telephone directories until 1978; he may have been raised in Union.
He and wife Marie moved to College Hill to raise Robert, Jr., Thomas, Donald and Matthew. The amateur tool and die maker frequented South Orange’s Memorial Park Duck Pond. He would test his self-made radio control model boats as a member of the South Orange Seaport Society and RC Model Boat Club.
Nine grandchildren also survive him. Brother Frederick predeceased him. Memorial donations may go to St. Joseph’s Church Maintenance Fund, 797 Prospect St., 07040.
EAST ORANGE – About all that is left with a weapons and narcotics possession case against a city man, now that he has pleaded guilty to three such counts in a Newark federal court Feb. 4, is his June 24 sentencing.
Ibraheem Muhammad, 41, said Acting U.S. Attorney Vikas Khanna that Wednesday, had pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Brian R. Martinotti to one count each of being a former felon in possession of a weapon, possessing a weapon in furtherance of a drug trafficking crime and possessing drugs with intent to distribute.
Court records state that EOPD officers and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives – Newark Field Office agents arrested Muhammad outside of his city apartment here May 9, 2022. City and federal detectives had alleged that they saw Muhammad leave his address and deal in narcotics. They found in his possession “envelopes of heroin.”
Muhammad’s apartment search yielded cocaine, fentanyl and heroin, packaging materials, about $14,000 in cash, a Girsan semi-automatic handgun loaded with 14 rounds of ammunition and 15 more rounds of 9mm. ammunition.
Muhammad is facing between five years or life in prison plus a $250,000 maximum fine for the firearm possession while drug trafficking charge alone. The drug charge carries up to 20 years’ prison and a $1 million maximum fine. Being a felon possessing a firearm carries up to 10 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.
Khanna thanked East Orange Public Safety Director Maurise Boyd, among other law enforcers, for his department’s part in the investigation.
ORANGE – Both Orange and ECPO detectives have been busy investigating two injurious shootings that happened just yards inside of city limits here Feb. 11 and 6.
OPD units went to Hillyer Street on gunfire reports in the early hours of Feb. 11. They found ” a male victim suffering a gunshot wound.”
An EMS unit was summoned to take the victim to University Hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries. Hillyer, a north-south street, is two blocks west of the border with East Orange’s Brick Church section.
OPD’s night shift officers had responded to a late night Feb. 6 shooting along the “500 block of Cary Street.” They found an awake 44-year-old East Orange man “with a non-life-threatening gunshot wound in the area on the NJTransit Morris & Essex Line railroad overpass.
Ambulance medics took him to a local hospital for treatment after he gave an account of what happened to police. Police taped off that block of Cary in the Orange Valley was three blocks east of the West Orange border.
WEST ORANGE – Township Council members and perhaps housing board members may be talking with an apartment complex owner and one of his tenants before the latter’s complaints come to municipal court.
Maureen Robinson, at the council’s Feb. 11 meeting, said that she is preparing to take SELA Realty Investments, owner of the Cedar Crest Apartments at 200 Mt. Pleasant Ave., to court over “subpar” living conditions and “unfair and inequitable disparity” in rent. Although she came to Mayor Susan McCartney, Council President Joe Krakowiak – not Mayor as mistakenly indicated in the previous edition – and other township elders before and has had housing officials over, she said she was preparing to sue her landlord.
Robinson said that she had Geniece Gary-Adams – the township’s zoning and code enforcement and property maintenance officer – over to her apartment Jan. 22 over mold, a bathroom handicap bar and other longstanding conditions she had previously brought to Cedar Crest/SELA.
Gary-Adams, before leaving, told building management that they had a week to make repairs. Those repairs, said Robinson, were not made as of Feb. 11.
Robinson said that she had noticed that none of the 178 apartments in the 11-building complex have water meters – which makes “delegation for fees for water usage is determined at the discretion and whim of property owners.”
Robinson said that she pays a separate $50 monthly water use fee. She had asked about installing an in-apartment portable washer-dryer unit but was told that she would then incur an additional $50 monthly fee.
Cedar Crest was built on a cliff face on Mt. Pleasant Avenue’s west side in 1967. Neither property management or SELA have publicly commented on Robinson’s accusations.
SOUTH ORANGE – Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, on Feb. 10, has hired a New York law firm to review another New York firm’s 2019 investigation – and perhaps put an end to questions surrounding newly appointed Seton Hall University President Joseph Reilly.
Tobin said that Ropes & Gray, LLC will review the report made by Watkins & Latham, LLP on who knew and when of the sexual misconduct of one of his predecessors – the defrocked Theodore E. McCarrick.
Reilly was a monsignor and on several SHU boards when McCarrick’s abuse of seminary students surfaced and were investigated. McCarrick, now 94, was laicized by Pope Francis in 2019 and was last seen “living a life of penance and seclusion” in a Kansas halfway house.
“Questions have been raised about Msgr. Reilly had acted appropriately,” said Tobin. “The review by Ropes & Gray will include on how the findings of these reports relate to him, including whether they were communicated to any and all appropriate personnel at the Archdiocese, SHU and Msgr. Reilly and, if so, by what means and by whom.”
Tobin had personally installed Reilly as SHU’s 22nd president last November. Reilly had been removed from several of the school’s boards and as its seminary dean in 2021 after an internal report had named him among the officials “who knew.”
SHU said that its lawyer firm on retainer, Gibbons, of Newark, will cooperate with Ropes & Gray. Pope Francis appointed the then-Archbishop of Indianapolis Tobin to Newark and named him a cardinal in 2017.
BLOOMFIELD – David Quinlan, 72, the 35-year minimum wage janitor for Bloomfield Public Schools and the face of a disabilities discrimination suit, died on Jan. 29.
Quinlan had died in a local hospice from a bladder infection that kept him from working at Bloomfield Middle School since 2020. He, his family and BPS had reached a $150,000 settlement in State Superior Court-Newark Jan. 14.
Quinlan had been working diligently since his Sept. 1, 1985 hiring by the district. He cleaned classrooms and hallways, mowed lawns and picked up trash on the BMS property despite being unable to read and barely speaking.
The district had hired him as a part-time per diem minimum wage worker. He started earning $7 an hour and was at $12 an hour before he got sick. His colleagues got twice that wage plus a full range of benefits.
The family and their Closter attorneys, Eric and Lawrence Kleiner, said that Quinlan never received health benefits, sick leave or vacation pay. They brought BPS to court in 2022, saying that the district wrongfully dismissed him and had violated New Jersey’s Law Against Discrimination. The district’s attorney said that he was paid based on his part-time hours, that his hours did not qualify him for benefits and that he voluntarily resigned.
David Joseph Quinlan, Jr., who was born here Dec. 12, 1952, and his family received $100,000 with the Kleiners splitting the other $50,000. The settlement came with BPS with non-wrongdoing admission and non-disparagement clauses. O’Boyle Funeral Home handled his last rites.
MONTCLAIR – The Archdiocese of Newark and the Immaculate Conception High School Board of Trustees announced at 6 p.m. Feb. 12 that their high school here will end a century of service June 30. It was founded by then-parish Pastor Edward Farrell in 1925.
The joint announcement 6 p.m. that Wednesday cited a “continued decline in enrollment, ongoing financial challenges and the condition of the aging facility” for the closing. The Sisters of Charity-run school had 246 students and 25 teachers in 2021-22, which is an improvement when the first Archdiocese call to close came in May 2014, when the school had 168 students.
ICHS classrooms are in a 1928 purpose-built 11 Cottage Place school building that can hold 400 and Tekawitha Hall, an 1899 building for the former IC Elementary School. ICES classes closed June 30, 2001 and its unpromoted students were transferred to other Catholic schools.
The announcement came at the tail end of Catholic Schools Week. ICHS and other Archdiocese schools went on their Feb. 14 “C-Day” holiday closing and Feb. 17-21 Winter Recess. A pledge by RCAN Catholic Schools Superintendent Barbara Solan to hold a resource information session four what would have been ICHS’s Classes of 2026-28 has not been set as of press time.
Also telling in the Archdiocese-trustees communication is the lack of financial data. When RCAN said that the school would close June 30, 2014 due to a $900,000 deficit, a nationwide month of alumni and community fundraising donated $500,000 to keep the school open.
It appears that ICHS’s Blue Lions are playing this last season for at least pride. Its 11-13 boys basketball team, who is defending its NJSIAA Non Public North B state championship, got as far as the Essex County Tournament when they were defeated by Newark’s St. Peter’s Prep, 67-51 Feb. 8.
GLEN RIDGE – An unnamed motorist may have answered to his alleged Jan. 15 road rage incident here in Glen Ridge Municipal Court by now.
The driver would have given his testimony in response to simple and vehicular assault charges levied against him by the borough police department just after 8:13 a.m. that Wednesday at Ridgewood and Woodland avenues.
Responding GRPD officers said that they had responded to a car collision and “road rage” at that borough intersection. They found two cars with crash damage and their two drivers – one of whom was apparently nursing a wound.
The wounded driver had stopped to let school children cross Ridgewood Avenue when that motorist’s car was “intentionally rear-ended.” The other driver was said to have exited the second car, “verbally berated the first driver” and struck the driver in the face.
It is not clear whether the incident happened just north or south of Ridgewood’s intersection with Woodland. The intersection – marked by the Glen Ridge train station, two banks and the post office – has marked crosswalks, a double yellow centerline and signaling for pedestrians.
NJ Motor Vehicle Commission law, like most states, requires drivers to “stop and stay’ before pedestrians using marked or unmarked crosswalks. The accused party is considered innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.
BELLEVILLE – Township detectives spent the bulk of the Presidents Day weekend investigating a two-car collision, one of which leaving Route 21 North, at about 9:15 p.m. Feb. 14. The crash sent one of the drivers to University Hospital for treatment. A Feb. 15 BPD release said that officers went to Rt. 21 Mile Post 7.4 on multiple reports of the collision and that one of the cars had crashed through the guardrails and had “plunged into the Passaic River.”
The first arriving police units found a 2005 Honda Accord not in the river but on the riverbank. Its driver, a 41-year-old man from Paterson, was trapped inside. First responders took him to hospital while BPD officers closed all northbound 21 lanes. The other driver, who stayed at the scene was uninjured and faces no charges as of press time.
“Gulf” Shirt Flap Probed
Interim Belleville Public Schools Superintendent Nicholas Perrapato said on Feb. 4 that he was investigating whether Belleville High School teachers had recently worn “Gulf of America” t-shirts in class – but do not expect to hear much more from him about it.
Perrapato, in a Feb. 4 open letter, said that the administration is investigating “a small group of staff members wore coordinated clothing that some students and staff found offensive. As this is a personnel matter, we’re unable to discuss specific details. We’re addressing this in accordance with district policies and details.” A BHS staff member alerted Perrapato’s office after several teachers had worn “Gulf of America” t-shirts on Jan. 31 dress down day.
President Donald J. Trump had signed an executive order Jan. 20 renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” and proclaimed Feb. 9 “Gulf of America Day.” Although Google and some other websites followed the renaming while international reference sites retained “Gulf of Mexico. The President’s Office has indefinitely banned Associated Press reporters from Presidential events and Feb. 14 over the latter’s retention of “Mexico” in their stylebook.
About 71 percent of the BHS student body identify themselves as of Hispanic or Latino origin – its largest single demographic group. Belleville is 53 percent according to the 2020 Census. While there are no known photos of people wearing the shirts, there may be pictures taken on cell phones.
