TOWN WATCH
By Walter Elliott
NEWARK – Two Newark police officers, accused of stealing household items from a scene they were investigating, have been suspended without pay until city and county internal affairs units have finished their inquiries.
Off. Taisha Wright and Off. Bianca White, said Acting Essex County Prosecutor Theodore Stephens II and Newark Public Safety Director Anthony Ambrose Sept. 5, are facing burglary and theft charges plus related conspiracy counts.
Wright and White, said Stephens and Ambrose, were on motor patrol duty when they responded to a suspicious activity call from a Sunset Avenue apartment Aug. 31.
After securing and investigating the scene, Wright allegedly took a charger and a case of bottled water from the first floor apartment and placed the objects into the squad car.
Wright and White returned later that Monday, they added, so that White could pry open the front door and take a Bluetooth speaker.
Stephens thanked The NPD Office of Professional Standards for bringing the incident up to the ECPO Professional Standards Office.
What happened Aug. 31 came about a week after two other NPD officers were put on administrative duty after allegedly turning off their body cameras and failing to report on the car pursuit they had engaged in.
IRVINGTON – ECPO’s Homicide/Major Crimes Task Force detectives are probing the Sept. 12 fatal shooting of a man here in the township’s Olympic Park section.
Irvington police officers, responding to calls of gunfire before Midnight, found 37-year-old Maurice Stevens, Jr. lying along the 50-block of Prospect Avenue. Stevens, who was rushed to Newark’s University Hospital died in the early hours of Sept. 13.
IPD and ECPO detectives spent Sunday’s predawn hours investigating on-site at Prospect Avenue and 39th Street. Further details of the incident and Mr. Stevens were not available as of Noon Sept. 15.
Prospect and 39th are in a largely residential neighborhood a block east of the former Olympic Park amusement area-now industrial zone.
EAST ORANGE – City Council President Christopher James has an additional task, from the Democratic Municipal Officers group, until past the Nov. 3 General Election.
The DMO leadership has named the First Ward Councilman as president of its revived New Jersey Chapter Sept. 5. James will act as a liaison between Garden State municipal officials who identify as Democrats and the Democratic National Committee.
DMO-NJ is among 20 chapters across the U.S. who bring their local level issues to the national party and visa-versa. Three of those chapter presidents have seats with the DNC leadership.
DMO’s priority into Nov. 3 is to have state voter registration application forms available to the public.
ORANGE – City police officers have been looking for the four men who robbed a fifth at a major city intersection here since Sept. 2.
A man told responding OPD officers and detectives that he was accosted by the quartet at South Essex Street and Freeway Drive East at about 11:10 p.m. that Sunday.
Three held the victim while a fourth went through his pockets. They took $200, a New Jersey MVC driver’s license and two TD Bank cards before fleeing.
WEST ORANGE – Township native Gary Odendhal, Sr., who retired from 53 years’ service to Fairfield Sept. 10, may have reinvented himself yet again while you read this.
Odendhal, who officially ended his career as a Fairfield Township employee Sept. 1, was given an outdoor reception by Business Administrator Joseph Catenaro and councilmen John LaForgia and Joseph Cifelli. They bestowed him a service plaque in the company of his three sons, daughter-in-law and grandson.
Odendhal was sworn into the police department here Jan. 1, 1967, retiring as Sgt. Odendhal in 1982. The Caldwell High School graduate had been a Fairfield resident since his family’s 1956 move.
Ptl./Sgt Odendahl became known as “G” or “The Duke” – the latter for his tattoo honoring John Wayne. He became an avid motorcycle rider, joining the Blue Knights club in the 1980s.
Sgt. Odendhal, after 64 days’ retirement, returned as FPD’s dispatcher. He took a 24-hour leave in 1993 to become the DPW’s Supervisor of Maintenance.
One reception guest, noting Ohendahl’s daily work on Fairfield’s municipal buildings, asked, “How are we going to find anything when G’s gone?” A FPD Facebook posting sent him off with, “Come back any time (but just to visit).”
SOUTH ORANGE – Essex County’s contractors will have begun its Irvington Avenue streetscape work – and have detoured traffic – by when you read this.
The county told the village’s elders Sept. 11 that it will start work on South Orange’s portion of the avenue Sept. 14. The affected intersections include Tichenor Avenue and Riggs Place, Fairview and West Fairview avenues and College and Wesley places. (The avenue’s Ward Place intersection, despite the Village Board of Trustees’ request, is excluded.)
Work along “Seton Village’s Main Street” includes sidewalk improvements, new street lighting and trash cans, highlighted street crosswalks, a bicycle lane and street milling and repaving. The village’s section is being paid by a 2019 county $1.062 million grant.
The first of two phases are to continue until the weather turns cold in mid-November and resume next spring.
This project will work its way to Maplewood and Newark-Ivy Hill’s parts of the avenue until it reaches “Maplewood Corners” – where Maplewood’s Irvington and Parker Avenues and Irvington’s Clinton Avenues meet. There will also be local improvements for Clinton and Parker avenues.
The Irvington Avenue streetscaping is the result of 10 years’ study, planning, grant and contract awarding.
MAPLEWOOD – The Township Committee’s inquest on sexual harassment and assault claims from the Maplewood Community Pool continues past the facility’s seasonal Sept. 7 closing.
Mayor Frank McGehee and his committee colleagues, as of Sept. 15, have installed new hiring practices at the pol towards the 2021 season. At least one employee had been reprimanded as of Sept. 1.
It is not clear whether the reprimanded employee was the same one named by a 20-year-old worker on an Aug. 17 MCPJustice Instagram account. The worker, who said she had been subjected to sexual harassment since starting her job five years earlier, said that the man in question ” is not the only predator.”
McGehee and the committee held an emergency Aug. 17 meeting on the matter after 12 lifeguards and other staff members walked out that morning; several employees also resigned that day, leaving the pool short-staffed until Sept. 7.
MONTCLAIR – Those 1,086 to 1,101 Vote By Mail ballots left over from Montclair’s May 12 nonpartisan municipal election will remain uncounted.
That was New Jersey Superior Court Judge Thomas Vena’s ruling from his Newark bench Sept. 11. His ruling in the McNeil vs. Way case denies Mr. McNeil, Dr. Renee Baskerville and 13 other Montclarions’ injunction to have the Essex County Clerk’s Election Division and Board of Elections include them in a final count.
Those ballots, which would make up nine percent of the township’s May 12-14 vote count, were rejected because they arrived at the county’s Hall of Records in Newark past the May 14 deadline and/or had signatures that did not match what was on their registered voters rolls.
The petitioners, who named N.J. Secretary of State Tahesha Way, Essex County Clerk Chris Durkin, County Elections Board President Linda von Nessi and Township Clerk Juliette Lee as respondents – assert that the rejected ballots could have changed the outcome of the race for mayor and four of the township council races.
The petitioners said that the May 12 election was being held during a pandemic and Gov. Phil Murphy’s “shelter in place” executive order. The election had no mechanism for registered voters to resolve any signature problems.
These petitioners further asserted that the USPS Montclair Main Post office had closed its public office at 3 p.m., four hours earlier than regularly posted, due to staff shortages.
Vena cited Murphy’s Executive Order 105, which set the May 12-14 48 hour delivery race period for denying the ballot in question to be counted. Murphy, in a later order for the July 7 party primary and Nov. 3 general elections, has extended the grace period to seven days.
BLOOMFIELD – Township Police Director Samuel DeMaio has posted photos of a man wanted for a Sept. 5 robbery from an Ampere strip mall store.
Officers responded to a call from Sally Beauty Supply at 135 Bloomfield Ave. that Saturday. The manager there said a man had just taken two flat irons, worth an overall $157, and left.
A Bloomfield/Staples Plaza security camera captured the image of the suspect, who is described as “a younger Hispanic man.”
He is shown as wearing a black-and-white backwards, a black t-shirt, a grey backpack, light blue knee-length jeans and black shoes. He was using a silver folding kick scooter in one photo.
Bloomfield Plaza, on the old Erie Newark Branch freight yard, became Staples Plaza when it welcomed its new anchor store.
BELLEVILLE – A call from township officers here to their Newark colleagues to the latter’s canvassing of one of their North Newark border neighborhoods here early Sept. 12.
BPD officers, responding to a call made from the RWJBarnabas Clara Maass Medical Center here, found a seriously injured man there in the wee hours Saturday morning.
The man told hospital workers and police that he had just walked from the intersection of Newark’s Broadway and Verona Avenue – where several other men had just beaten him “around Midnight.”
While the man had walked into Clara Maass’ emergency ward, it is not known how he otherwise made the 30-min. walk from Broadway and Verona. NPD’s 2nd Precinct officers combed the area for suspects in the predawn hours.
The intersection’s northwest corner features a now-closed ARCO gasoline station and the site of the Boonton Line’s North Newark station.
