TOWN WATCH August 20, 2020

by Walter Elliott

NEWARK – Relatives and Newark’s LGBTQ community are hoping that Mayor Ras Baraka’s office and the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office Homicide and Major Crimes Task Force will determine the circumstances of Ashley Dean Moore, Jr.’s April 1 death here downtown and the Newark Police Division’s handling of her case.

Baraka, on Aug. 13, told mother Starlet Carbins that he and Newark Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose had asked the county task force, on Aug. 10, to re-examine Moore’s case. The move had been asked for by Carbins, Newark LGBTQ advocates and reporters since June.

“We believe the police followed all necessary policies and procedures around Ashley Moore’s death – but the case’s handling has raised concerns of her family and the LGBTQ community,” said Baraka that Thursday. “We fully expect to inform them of our police action and answer any lingering questions that they may have about Ms. Moore’s death to the absolute best of our ability.”

Carbins has in her possession so far an incident report she had received NPD in June – a report that conflicted with NPD’s initial and a University Hospital doctor’s findings. The N.J. Regional Medical Examiner’s autopsy report is awaiting toxicology results.

Carbins said she first found out of her daughter’s death when she found “Rest in Peace” postings on Ashley’s Facebook page April 9. The Springfield, Mass. traveling nurse wanted to wish Ashley on what would have been her 27th birthday.

NPD and local EMS found Moore’s body in front of the YM/YWCA, 600 Broad St./Gibson Blvd. 4:10 a.m. April 1. Moore, a chef at WTC’s Top of the World Observatory the last four years, had been paying rent there the last two.

Police first theorized that Moore was hit by a car, then had jumped from the 11-story Y’s roof. The University Hospital doctor’s exam, however, found injuries inconsistent with those theories.

Moore’s virtual memorial was held on Zoon June 16. Father Ashley, Sr. and a younger brother are also among the Morgan City, La. and Freehold High School student’s survivors.

A JusticeforAshleyMoore.org website and a GoFundMe page, whose proceeds will be used to hire a lawyer, have been established.

IRVINGTON – Township police officers are looking for the man who took an unwilling female passenger on a short but wild ride at Lyons and Union avenues Aug. 16.

IPD officers and local EMS medics, responding to a car collision call 8:51 p.m. Sunday, found an overturned car at the intersection. They also found a woman, “appearing to have minor injuries,” standing nearby.

The woman, while being treated by EMS, said she was a passenger when “a black male” slid into the driver’s seat and started to drive away. The original driver, she said, had just stopped to go to a store and left the vehicle unlocked and running.

When the victim demanded the carjacker/kidnapper that she be let out, he looked at her – and ran into a parked car. The impact caused the first car to overturn.

The suspect, who promptly fled, remains at large as of presstime.

EAST ORANGE – The Newark Police Division still has an arrest warrant of an East Orange man responsible for a July 12 armed carjacking in the former’s Fairmount Heights section.

Laron Carmen, 22, is so far the only one identified of three people who approached a motorist at Newark’s 13th Avenue and South Seventh St., around 9:30 p.m. that Sunday.

The driver said that one of the trio pointed a gun at him and ordered him out of his gold 2001 Ford Taurus. They also took the victim’s cash, credit cards and other personal property before speeding away.

Carmen is described as standing 5-ft., 7-in., weighing around 160 lbs. He has black hair and brown complexion and eyes. He also has a tattoo on his neck.

ORANGE – Organizers of the city’s Black Lives Matter street mural painted in a big way here Aug. 8.

A group of volunteer painters spent their Saturday night painting the now-familiar yellow BLM block letters across nearly three whole blocks of Main Street. Braving a weather forecast of scattered rain showers, the painters started from just short of the Day Street intersection and worked east to almost the Park Street/Hickory Street crossing.

The night painters ranged from residents to State Assemblywoman Britnee Timberlake (D-East Orange) and members of the Municipal Council, Orange Board of Education and Orange Fire Department Fire Officers Association Local 210.

Resident Fatimah Turner told a reporter that three of her relatives had suffered from police brutality. This month, said Turner, marked the 16th anniversary of sister Al-Nisa Patrice Stewart, 29, died while in Belleville police custody.

The letters, using Main Street’s double yellow centerline for guidance, stretched across the street almost to the parking lanes. “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” which can be read from the south, has a length longer than similar murals found in Newark and Maplewood. It may well be one of the longest murals among those being painted across the country.

The painters sprayed, rolled, edged and brushed with official assistance and blessing.

Mayor Dwayne D. Warren’s office posted the painting’s announcement on the city’s official Facebook page. The Orange Police Department and Essex County Roads and Bridges Division granted permission to paint on the county road.

OPD officers also detoured traffic – including buses on Coach USA’s No. 24B and NJTransit’s 21, 71 and 73 routes – for the night. The Orange Department of Public Works may have brought painting supplies.

It is to the understanding of “Local Talk” that that stretch of Main Street was chosen in part because it leads to the East Ward, where a majority of African Americans had lived during the city’s de facto segregation era into the 1960s.

WEST ORANGE – A township man, said Morris County Prosecutor Fredric M. Knapp Monday, has been held in his Morris Township county jail on human trafficking charges since Aug. 15.

Mcquary Goodrich, 28, said Knapp, has been charged on four counts of first-degree human trafficking and a second-degree sexual assault charge. Goodrich also faces third-degree counts of promoting prostitution, criminal coercion and terroristic threats.

Parsippany Police Chief Andrew Miller said his officers responded to a disturbance Aug. 15 at a Troy Hills section motel. They found Goodrich and a 31-year-old woman in a room, who said he had just raped her.

The woman told PPD and Morris County Sheriff’s officers that she had been taken to various area motels by Goodrich to meet and have sex with clients since March 2019. Goodrich, she said, would take the clients’ proceeds and verbally and physically abused her.

Goodrich, she said, demanded Saturday night that she had to find more clients or he would harm her family – and then raped her.

MAPLEWOOD / SOUTH ORANGE – A township debate over whether to keep its auxiliary police armed, or keep them at all, boiled over onto the front lawns of two of its committee members and crossed into South Orange.

Committeemen Greg Lembrich and Vic DeLuca said they woke up Aug. 5 to find signs on their lawns they had not placed. The mostly hand-made signs read the likes of “Abolish the Auxiliary,” “Disarm and Disband” and “Put Down Your Guns, B—h.” One “Hate Has No Place in SOMA” sign had “Hate” replaced with South Orange Chief of Police Kyle Kroll’s name.

“I ran for this office but my family has not run for anything,” said Lembrich, who is also the TC’s Public Safety Chairman. “My family and house are out-of-bounds.”

“I’m shocked,” said DeLuca. “Never in my 21 years of office holding had someone come onto my property and placed signs overnight.”

The Maplewood Police Department, who took the signs as evidence, is continuing an investigation. The sign makers/planters will be charged with criminal trespass and vandalism.

The Township Committee and South Orange Trustees issued a joint statement Aug. 7, calling the act as “crossing the line” of activism. Village President Sheena Collum added that she is proud of an open-minded, community-oriented police chief like Kroll.

In the meantime, the Township Committee had suspended the Maplewood Police Auxiliary July 21-Oct. 21 while it considered whether to keep the volunteer force armed while on duty. They also added the auxiliary to the scope of the township’s committee on policing.

MONTCLAIR – Cuban Pete’s restaurant owner Dominick Restaino, after getting unwanted attention from Montclair officials Aug. 7 and State Police Superintendent Col. Patrick Callahan Aug. 10, has to answer a social-distancing violation summons in Montclair Municipal Court later this month.

Montclair Police and Health Department officers, saying they were acting on a tip, entered 428 Bloomfield Ave. after 6 p.m. Aug. 7. They first found diners seated outdoors at tables that were spaced less than Gov. Phil Murphy’s Executive Order 105’s six-foot-social distancing spacing.

They also found customers seated at three tables in one room and at two in another. They too were not maintaining social distancing. Restaino was then issued a summons for having indoor dining – a violation of Order 105.

“What am I to do?” asked Restaino to a reporter Aug. 8. “I was spacing out tables for the 30 customers when the rain started. Was I going to tell them, ‘No, You’ll have to leave now?’ “

Callahan mentioned Cuban Pete’s in his part of Gov. Murphy’s Aug. 10 daily coronavirus briefing.

This may not have been the first time, going by a May 10 “Local Talk” observation, when Cuban Pete’s staff ran into a social distancing circumstance. “Local Talk,” while on an errand at 4:30 p.m. that Mother’s Day, first noticed MPD squad cars first arriving to get five other double-parked cars moved.

Three police officers, on their way to find the double-parkers, found 80 to 100 customers either seated at outdoor tables or standing in line along the eatery’s alley onto the sidewalk. All must have been getting takeout food for their mothers – and most not spacing out every six feet.

“Local Talk,” returning at 5:20 p.m., found the double parked cars gone. Restaurant staff, between calling out take out order numbers, tried to spread out their waiting customers.

BLOOMFIELD – There has been no update, as of presstime, on the man who the State Police said fell onto the Garden State Parkway from an overpass Aug. 13.

State Police Sgt. Lawrence Peele, speaking from the Bloomfield Barracks that Thursday night, that the 50-year-old man found in the GSP northbound center lane 3:10 p.m. at milepost 152.4, was admitted in serious but stable condition at Newark’s University Hospital.

State Troopers and local EMS found the otherwise unidentified man away from the Watchung Avenue overpass, just ahead of Exit 151. Whatever local traffic congestion had cleared by 3:40 p.m.

The NJSP is investigating how the man fell onto the highway.

GLEN RIDGE – Lawyers representing a former Glen Ridge Police Department officer and the borough’s first woman chief of police have reportedly settled a four-year harassment suit for $696,568.

Roseland’s Curcio, Mirzal & Sirota, LLC and Borough Attorney John Malyskaia told the State Superior Court-Newark Aug. 14 of their settlement. The borough is to pay Sgt. Merritt Carr $675,000 and his lawyers $21,568. The payment, by agreement, is not an admission of wrongdoing.

Carr, who has applied for a state disability pension, is to no longer pursue GRPD employment. Both sides are not to say anything negative about the other.

Carr, in his Oct. 23, 2016 court filing claimed that Police Chief Sheila Byron-Lagattuta had conducted a campaign of harassment and intimidation since January 2015. Byron-Lagattuta’s actions, Carr asserted, violated the state’s family leave and whistleblower acts.

Carr, after being removed as firing range instructor, brought his complaints to borough officials. Byron-Lagattuta then put him on administrative leave until he passed a medical fitness exam. He was transferred from being a patrol sergeant to an administrative sergeant – the latter with fewer benefits and less flexibility of hours.

The events, said Carr, left him and his wife hospitalized with anxiety attacks and stress disorders.

BELLEVILLE – Township police officers firefighters entered the township’s part of Branch Brook on a Second River rescue call here Aug. 10.

Belleville’s finest and bravest first got a call of a car crash at Mill Street and Union Avenue at 9:15 p.m. that Monday. They did find a car with its driver aboard, not at the intersection – but in the Second River channel some 12 feet east.

The driver, who suffered minor injuries, was in no danger of drowning. The five-mile long river has a one-foot depth in the Branch Brook channel.

NUTLEY – The township’s Board of Commissioners’ vote on whether to dissolve the Nutley Volunteer Emergency and Rescue Squad, thanks to a late agreement between two parties, was postponed two weeks from just before their scheduled Aug. 18 meeting.

The Commissioners had removed Ordinance 3449 from their 7 p.m. Tuesday night agenda with two hours to spare.

Public Safety Commissioner Alphonse Petracco had asked for technically tabling his measure Sept. 1. The agenda’s 5 p.m. posting prompted NVERS officials to call off its 6 p.m. “Save Our Squad” protest rally.

Petracco is likely reviewing financial records that the squad had brought to him Monday morning while you read this. NVERS’s board of directors had agreed to turn over those records at their Aug. 13 meeting.

At issue are the squad’s purchase of three used Chevrolet Tahoe SUVs, averaging $8,500 each. The squad bought them this spring so they can continue responding to calls while disinfecting their regular ambulances. The ambulances are cleaned after every call as a COVID coronavirus procedure.

Petracco introduced Ord. 3449 over the Tahoes and other financial questions July 21 – which all five commissioners approved. He invoked a clause in the 1953 ordinance that created NVERS where the public safety commissioner can call for its dissolution at any time.

Squad officials questioned whether Petracco still had the authority, given that NVERS became a 501(c) 3 non-profit organization in 1978.

Liked it? Take a second to support {Local Talk Weekly} on Patreon!