by Walter Elliott
NEWARK – Sanaa Amenhotep’s scheduled 5 p.m. May 6 memorial service here at Weequahic High School’s Untermann Field would be the second one in four days – and 689 miles apart.
Amenhotep’s first memorial was held May 3 at Blythewood, S.C. Relatives and friends left Leevy’s Funeral Home Chapel to hold a candlelight vigil and balloon release at nearby Doko Meadows Park.
Mother Saleemah Graham-Fleming, who Amenhotep was staying in Columbia, and father Sharif Amenhotep, an anti-violence activist in Newark.
Sharif left for Columbia upon the April 5 report that Sanaa, 15, was reported missing. He and members of the New Black Panther Party were among the search parties in Lexington County.
Sanaa’s body was found, her body shot 11 times, in the woods April 29 near Leesburg. Lexington Sheriff’s officers arrested and charged Traevon Nelson, 18, with kidnapping and murder April 30. A male and a female juvenile have also been arrested.
Graham-Fleming and Sharif are advocating, “Sanaa’s Law,” where law enforcement will treat missing person reports as kidnapping if the parents believe their child had been abducted.
Sanaa was a WHS student and a frequent marcher and attendee of Newark Anti-Violence Coalition.
IRVINGTON – Former history-making mayor Michael Steele has been given a clean bill of health by specialists of a stroke he had suffered six months ago.
Irvington’s first African American mayor said that his physicians and three therapists for releasing him from further work as of April 15. Steele, 65, had suffered a mild stroke that put him in speech and occupational therapy for four months.
“It was my best birthday gift – to get a new lease on life,” said Steele. “It’s been four months and I feel great. I just have to follow some rules, take my medication regularly and exercise.”
Steele said that he became fatigued while out on a deep-sea fishing trip with his brother-in-law a week before his 65th birthday. His wife noticed increasingly slurred speech the next three days and had him go to RWJBarnabas Newark Beth Israel Medical Center.
Although Newark Beth Israel released Steele, now of Union, on his 65th birthday, the RWJBarnabas hospital assigned him two a pair of occupational therapists and a speech therapist as an outpatient.
Steele was first elected onto the Irvington Board of Education in 1980 and as the township’s first African American mayor 1990-94. He was also Irvington Public Schools’ business administrator 1986 until his 2008 retirement.
EAST ORANGE – The City Council is scheduling its set of departmental hearings since it has received Mayor Ted Green’s proposed $152.7 million Calendar Year 2021 municipal budget here on April 26.
The hearings are where the department heads and directors try to justify their parts of the 2021 budget before council members. there are 22 departments – from the Alcoholic Beverage Control board to the Tax Collector’s office – to report in over a four day period.
The sessions help the council to decide whether make slight to major changes to the Green Administration’s budget plan – or leave it as-is towards a mid-year budget hearing and ratification vote.
Although Mayor Green’s CY2020 budget is some 100,000 less than 2020’s approved outlay, it is coming with a zero percent increase on city property taxes.
The flat, or unchanged, tax rate corresponds to three years of declining tax increases. The increase went down from 1.5 percent in 2018, 1.2 in 2019 and .44 in 2020.
“We understand that this’ a difficult time and we wanted to make sure that we don’t add to the financial burden our residents already have on their shoulders,” said Green in his presentation that Monday night. “This proposed budget reflects what happens when we make sound financial decisions and work towards a common goal of ensuring all residents receive top-quality” city services.”
The hearings, like the council meetings, maybe held via Zoom. While the city is also the tax collector for East Orange School District and Essex County taxes, it is not responsible for the latter two’s increases or decreases.
ORANGE – Last rites for the city man who was shot dead in Irvington April 24 has been set for May 14-15.
A viewing for Eliimao Maxime, 32, is to be held here at the Cotton Funeral Home 4-6 p.m. May 14, followed by an 11 a.m. May 15 funeral at nearby Bethel Baptist Church. Initial reports for Maxime, who was born Feb. 19, 1988, had his first name as “Eliameau.”
The ECPO Homicide/Major Crimes Task Force is continuing the shooting of Maxime, and the wounding of a 23-year-old man April 24 along Union Avenue.
Pot Business Ban Bill Still Tabled
May 4’s City Council meeting came and went with Ordinance 14-2021 – which would ban all on-site cannabis-based businesses – tabled. until at least their May 19th meeting
Bill sponsor North Ward Councilwoman Tency Eason was unable to get a second from her colleagues to lift it from where they had tabled it on April 20. 14-2021, that Tuesday night, was poised for a second and final vote.
Most tabled measures may lie dormant for three council meetings before the governing body has to vote on it or kill it.
WEST ORANGE – Essex County’s Highlawn Pavillion, when it reopens in late summer, will be run by a new restaurant family for the first time in 35 years.
Harry and Kurt Knowles, Sr., of Knowles Restaurants, announced April 29 that they have turned over management of the Eagle Rock Reservation restaurant to Anthony and Jennifer Frungillo.
The agreement means more than picking up Highlawn’s 20-to-30-year lease to Essex County. The Frungillos will also be building an outdoor atrium to double its special events capacity, among other building facelifts.
The Frungillos also inherit the Knowles and Highlawn’s legacies of being the county’s first public-private partnership and subsequent renovation of the 125-year-old former Casino. The two-story open-air structure’s condition had deteriorated to where it became a reservation safety hazard.
Kurt Knowles said that the strain of running Highlawn in the age of social distancing and anticipated Pavillion repairs led to his family ending a 35-year “labor of love.” The Knowles knew the Frungillos from meeting here and at other common events.
Father Al Frungillo founded Gourmet Catering to serve Seton Hall, Kean, Monmouth and Rowan universities. So Anthony started a separate Frungillo Caterers, which manages food events at Bloomfield’s Oakeside Mansion, among other sites.
The Knowles will continue to run The Manor/Pleasantdale Chateau/Residence Inn at Marriott complex.
SOUTH ORANGE – The investigation of an April 24 one-car crash by Seton Hall University remains under ECPO investigation since April 29.
SOPD Sgt Richard Lombardi confirmed that the county’s Crash Scene Investigation Unit took over the probe. The single-vehicle crash at 525 South Orange Ave. left two occupants critically injured and a third admitted to a local hospital in stable condition.
“We’re not sure there’s any criminality involved,” said Lombardi that Thursday. “It’s an ongoing and open investigation with ECPO.”
Village police, fire and rescue squad units responded to the address at 7:30 a.m. that Saturday on a report of “a motor vehicle accident with entrapment and ejection.”
They found a four-door black late-model minivan with severe front-end damage. Two of the four occupants had to be cut out. Three were taken to University Hospital – a Level 1 Trauma Center.
An initial investigation had the van driving westbound when it lost control and dislodged a utility pie that fed 525 South Orange Ave. Both PSE&G and NJ American Water were called because first responders were unable to determine the pipe was an electrical or water conduit.
It is not known whether 525 tenant Tech 9 Multi Media was affected by the crash and utility cutoff. The one-story building used to be a SHU bookstore and, earlier a “Bundle of Rubble” restaurant. Traffic, including CoachUSA’s No. 31 buses and SHUFLY Shuttles, were detoured onto Montrose and neighborhood streets.
MAPLEWOOD – The Seth Boyden Demonstration School PTA has started a meal train and GoFundMe.com page to help the family of the late Marc Ulysse since April 28.
Sethboyden.com’s post described Ulysee, 41, as “a longstanding Maplewoodian who was a school bus driver in Newark who lost his fight with COVID over the weekend (April 24-25.)” Ulysee, who was born April 22, 1980, had died April 24.
He and wife Edmane had two sons in Seth Boyden, a third in Columbia and a fourth in a college. They were also raising a niece.
Ulysee’s viewing and Funeral Mass were held May 1 at East Orange’s Holy Spirit-Our Lady Help of Christians Church.
BLOOMFIELD – Township police officers assisted their Newark colleagues in locally apprehending a pair of juveniles after a car pursuit and flip on the Garden State Parkway here April 28.
Newark’s police backup call came after the vehicle they had pursued some five miles overturned after speeding past the GSP’s Northbound Exit 148.
NPD officers said they began following the vehicle, suspected of being carjacked, since spotting it at 14th Avenue and Jones Street 4:50 a.m. that Wednesday. Their pursuit entered the Parkway’s Exit 144 from South Orange Avenue.
The car flip would have ended the pursuit but two boys and a girl bailed out onto Watsessing neighborhood streets.
BPD officers apprehended the female along Crown Street and a male at Home Depot’s parking lot. The other male remains at large.
MONTCLAIR – Township veterans and residents are remembering a recently departed pioneering military aviator and her U.S. Army Air Corps brother here on the eve of Saturday’s May 8 76th anniversary of Victory in Europe Day.
Bernice and Lloyd Falk, who respectively graduated from Montclair High School in 1938 and 37, were a respective secretary and a Rutgers masters chemical engineering student when the U.S. entered World War Two.
Lloyd, who was born on Nov. 6, 1919 in Bradley Beach, enlisted in the US AAC in 1942. He served as a meteorologist whose forecasts helped Allied Supreme Commander Dwight D. “Ike” Eisenhower’s decision to launch D-Day on Normandy Beach on June 6, 1944.
Bernice, who was born on Dec. 15, 1920, in Ocean Grove, volunteered for the USAAC’s Women’s Airforce Service Program. The former weekend civilian pilot was among the 1,830 women who were trained to pilot and maintain aircraft being ferried to the European and Pacific theaters. Her letters while in training to Lloyd and patents LeRoy and Della Falk became the basis for her self-published book in 2008.
The first VE Day, May 8, 1945, found Lloyd on his way to an honorable discharge – and Bernice in Hollywood, trying to get producers to make a movie about the WASPs.
Although “Bee” had graduated in March 1944 to ferry aircraft, Army top brass disbanded the WASP program before Jan. 1, 1945. She became the president on Women Military Aviators in the 1970s and successfully pressed to grant WASPs military recognition and benefits.
B. Falk returned to New Jersey to become the state’s first woman Cessna dealer in the late 1940s. She kept flying and instructing into the 2000s after marrying aviator Joe Haydu and moving to Florida.
Lloyd meanwhile moved to Delaware, applying his chemical engineering doctorate to troubleshoot water pollution problems for DuPont. He was present at President Lyndon B. Johnson’s signing on the Clean Water Act in 1965.
Falk Haydu was one of the last three surviving WASPs when President Barack Obama awarded the group a Congressional Gold Medal in 2009 – which she attended. She died in a Palm City, Fla. assisted living facility Jan. 30, 2021.
Lloyd Falk died from a short illness in Richmond, Del. March 8, 2021. He recovered from a 58-day battle against COVID-19 to walk a daily half mile. COVID, however, claimed his wife of 75 years, Montclair native Elanor Ruth Falk, 98, April 7, 2020.
BELLEVILLE – Mayor Michael Melham and the Township Council will be re-opening the Council Chamber gallery to the public here as of their 6 p.m. May 11 meeting.
The Council, after 15 minutes’ deliberation, approved reopening the Town Hall chamber for the first time since the COVID pandemic’s start, during their April 27 meeting. The walk-on vote (Resolution 21-111 was not on April 27’s agenda) came after township elders’ April 13 discussion.
This municipal government will be re-joining Belleville’s library and education boards of trustees in holding live in-person meetings.
The Belleville Public Library BOT has been so holding its monthly meetings since the winter. The board of education has been holding their meetings – with temperature checks, masks and socially distant seating – all along in the Belleville High School auditorium.
Melham, on April 13, cited Gov. Phil Murphy’s March 11 Executive Order 230 whereby legislative body meetings are exempted from social distancing limits. EO 230 may be better known for increasing indoor and outdoor capacity limits for indoor venues like casinos and outdoor events like collegiate athletics.
Critics point out, however, that the N.J. Department of Community Affairs has been encouraging in-person and virtual hybrid meetings since September. (The DCA is headed by Lt. Gov. Sheila Y. Oliver, of East Orange.)
Those who do not feel comfortable attending council meetings here at 152 Washington Ave. may continue to watch the Zoom live feed through URL or phone links. Public comments may also be submitted online until 5 p.m. of the meeting night.
