NEWARK – A pair of Newark Police Division detectives were released here from University Hospital 48 hours apart after being injured by gunfire in a West Ward intersection Dec. 14.
While Dets. Nicholas Edert and Quadiyyah Marshall were respectively released to at least Newark Public Safety top brass fanfare Dec. 18 and 20, the man accused of shooting them remains in custody.
William Calvin Jones, 28, of East Orange, is being held on Essex County Prosecutor’s Office charges of aggravated assault on police officers plus state and federal weapons charges.
NPS Director Brian O’Hara said that Off. Edert and Det. Marshall were part of a detail responding to drug sales and violent crime reports in the area of 14th Avenue and So. 14th Street Dec. 14. They then approached a man to start a conversation at 8:35 p.m.
The suspect, identified as Jones, pulled out his own handgun and began firing at them. Off. Edert was struck in the groin and Det. Marshall in one of her legs. Fellow officers promptly subdued Jones and recovered his gun. Both NPD shot personnel suffered non-life-threatening injuries.
Det. Marshall was to have been released Dec. 19 but was delayed 24 hours after doctors found a remaining bullet fragment in her leg. O’Hara promoted Off. Edert to Detective upon his release.
IRVINGTON – Township police detectives have been looking for the one who shot a man multiple times along Montgomery Avenue Dec. 10.
IPD officers, responding to gunfire reports, arrived on the avenue’s 70 block at 11:45 p.m. that Friday. There they found a 28-year-old Irvingtonian “suffering bullet wounds in his hip and arm.”
Responding EMS took the victim to Newark’s University Hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries.
EAST ORANGE – 21 North Park St., where the Harris Diner still stands, may return to the food serving business as a replacement grocery retailer as early as next spring.
The East Orange Planning Board was to hear landowner JSB 21 LLC’s application and three variances for their proposed two-story grocery Dec. 1. City planners, however, have granted the applicant a hearing postponement to Feb. 2.
JSB, which had bought the .345-acre property from Bill and Mary Nichols in 2018, is asking city planners permission to replace the 1951 O’Mahoney diner with a 4,200-square-foot store that would sell “canned and frozen food, fruit and vegetables, packaged meat, fish and poultry; and other specialty food.”
The applicant is asking for 21 parking spaces – one more than what the diner had but one less than the city code requirement – and a shortened rear setback, in two of its three requested variances.
The building, should it be approved, will be the third on the site since Charles Harris built his original diner in 1945. JSB, in its documents submitted before Nov. 30, did not indicate whether they will allow diner aficionados to buy salvageable remnants beforehand.
The landmark diner suffered extensive damage from a fast-moving electrical fire on March 9, 2015. Although the blaze was brought under control by East Orange, South Orange, Bloomfield and Irvington firefighters within 30 minutes, two officers suffered minor injuries.
Harris sold the diner to the Karayianis-Nichols family in 1957.
ORANGE – The city’s public school district is allowing the Orange Division of Recreation to use four of its gymnasiums and two of its classrooms on selected days from Dec. 15 to April 15 and Orange Public Schools will be picking up the tab.
The Orange Board of Education, in a split 6-1-2 vote Dec. 14, granted Orange Recreation use of four gyms at the Lincoln and Park avenue schools, Orange Preparatory Academy and Orange High Schools plus two OPA classrooms for specified sports and special events.
Each of the Superintendent of Schools Gerald Fitzhaugh II-recommended resolutions carried “no charge for facility usage,” waiving the facility use fees. OPS’ “Educational Funds” are being used to pay for the utilities plus custodial and security labor.
Orange Recreation’s use of the Lincoln Avenue gym for Dec. 17’s Mayor Dwayne D. Warren’s Toy Give Away was held Dec. 17. It has meanwhile reserved the OHS Jesse Miles Gymnasium April 2 for its annual Easter Basket Program.
Orange Rec will use OPA facilities for two programs. The first, for weekday afterschool in two classrooms and gym, started Dec. 15 and is to run through April 15. OPA’s gym will also be used Saturdays Jan. 22-April 2 for the Elementary Age Basketball Program.
The Park Avenue School gym is the site of Orange Rec’s Saturday Eighth Grade Basketball games Dec. 15-March 5 and their Monday-Thursday practices Dec. 16-March 5.
OBOE President Shawneque Johnson, Vice President Jeffrey Wingfield and board members David Armstrong, Guadalupe Cabido, Samantha Crockett and Fatimah Turner made the authorization.
Panelist Sueanne Gravesande was the sole dissenter. Member Derrick Henry was absent and member Siaka Sherif left the OPA auditorium before the vote.
WEST ORANGE – A township man took a guilty plea deal from the Morris County Prosecutor’s Office Dec. 13 instead of facing a grand jury and more serious charges.
Michael A. Mecca, 40, in a Superior Court-Morristown hearing, pleaded guilty to a pair of second-degree charges: aggravated assault and possession of a weapon.
Mecca, by taking the guilty plea deal, confessed to shooting the mother of his children in her Roxbury home May 30. He said he was dropping off their youngest son when he and his ex got into an argument.
That argument led to Mecca taking out a .40 caliber pistol from his truck and shooting her. He left, only to return an hour later to shoot her in a thigh and a knee. Mecca’s relatives were present – including his mother, who tried to stop the shooting.
Mecca is to be sentenced Jan. 13. He is facing an up to six-year sentence for the assault plus a concurrent 5.5-year term for weapons possession. He is to pay his ex’s injury expenses and to have no further contact with her.
SOUTH ORANGE – Village officers who participated in a South Orange Community Police Collaborative study released Dec. 9 said they know of a couple of colleagues who racially profile.
The same SOPD officers told Seton Hall University’s Thomas Shea and New Jersey City University’s Vanessa Garcia that, while they take domestic violence cases seriously, they want more training in handling mental illness distress calls.
They also get mixed signals from the public on how to deal with the homeless.
The SOCPC commissioned SHU and NJCU researchers for the qualitative perception study, which happened to be conducted during summer 2020. Eight officers – all male but of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds, rank and experience – participated.
While the officers who talked with Shea and Garcia said they have “a pretty strong, positive relationship with the community,” Garcia noted that “the difference of opinion regarding race relations, when it came to the race of the officer. Minorities were more likely to see that there was some level of conflict; non-minorities didn’t see much of any kind of racial conflicts.”
Garcia added that the officers recognized “a bit of racial profiling, kind of localized,” seen “in one or two officers and not identified as a common practice among the department. (The eight surveyed make up six percent of SOPD’s uniformed force.)
Garcia recommended that the profiling be addressed as soon as a new chief of police is hired. Capt. Stephen Dolinac was named acting chief after 33-year member Kyle Kroll retired from being the village’s “top cop” May 1.
“Rumors are difficult to investigate and to take action on,” said Dolinac Dec. 9. “We have to have people willing to identify themselves and say what they saw. When we do an investigation, it’s as robust as the investigation of a criminal offense.”
MAPLEWOOD – Although Maplewood is one of three “Local Talk” area towns that name its mayor and deputy mayor in advance of its annual around Jan. 1 reorganization meeting. Dec. 7’s session did not go as well as planned.
Current Deputy Mayor Dean Dafis was nominated by fellow Township Committeeman Victor de Luca at their public meeting that Tuesday night.
Incoming Committeewoman Jamaine Cripe, however, nominated Committeewoman and former deputy mayor Nancy Adams for mayor. Adams seconded her own nomination while current Mayor Frank McGehee remained silent.
Maplewood Democratic Committee Chairman Ian Grodman called for a vote – which resulted in a 2-2 tie. (All five Township Committee members are Democratic party members.)
“Being on the Township Committee is about service, sacrifice and dedication,” said McGehee. “Whether you’re black or white, LGTBQ, a man, a woman or non-binary, it’s about … working tirelessly for the greater good.”
McGhee then cast his vote in favor of Dafis. De Luca was later voted in as deputy mayor.
“In our community, the vote for who leads our town as mayor comes down to three people currently serving on our township committee,” said Dafis in his departing address. “That’s why it’s so important for our residents to pay attention and become more informed and engaged in the Maplewood Democratic Committee, who they vote for as district leaders and what happens behind-the-scenes in the vetting process.”
BLOOMFIELD – Friendly’s Restaurants may have followed Sears, Kmart, Pathmark and A&P through the “Local Talk” Land exit door here Dec. 19.
The shift manager quietly locked the door to 1243 Broad St. and turned off its lights just after 9:30 p.m. Sunday, ending a 52-year run here. While the store’s own Facebook page hawked Friendly’s gift cards and “Friendly’s Fridays” Dec. 17, the corporate website simply replaced its operating hours with “Closed.”
No one has officially said why this eatery has closed. Several longtime customers, after being told by employees that it was their last week, tipped off others about the last day on several Bloomfield FB sites Dec. 18.
Neither property owner Urstedt Biddle nor Friendly’s parent Amici Partners Group have said what they will do next to 1243 Broad, also known as Block 1088, Lot 59 on the township zoning and tax maps.
UB, which operates in the same Wilbraham, Mass. building as Friendly’s, is a real estate investment trust owning most of the other 136 Friendly’s among nine Northeast states, South Carolina and Florida. Amici, after buying Friendly’s out of its second bankruptcy in 10 years Jan. 19, said it intended to keep all of the restaurants open.
Founding brothers Curtis and Prestley Blake bought the .543 acre Brookdale section lot and had its Colonial-style restaurant built here in 1969 – like they had in West Orange and three other West Essex locations. The Jersey City-born brothers started out with an ice cream store in their Springfield, Mass. ancestral home in 1935.
The Blakes sold Friendly’s to Hershey Foods in 1979. Hershey built up to 800 restaurants and sold Friendly’s ice cream in supermarkets in the 1980s. Hershey sold the chain to the first of three owners in 1988, leading to its first Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2011-12.
MONTCLAIR – Selwa Shamy is the Montclair Public Library system’s interim director while its board of trustees searches for the ultimate successor to the departed Peter Coyle.
Shamy, of West Orange, was hired by Coyle as the two-branch system’s assistant director in 2018. It is not clear as of press time, whether she is among the to-be-considered as a director candidate.
Coyle, who was hired by the trustees in 2017, resigned on Dec. 10 to become director of the 28-branch regional Sacramento, Calif. system. It is a homecoming for Coyle, whose first library card was from SPL at five years old.
Coyle more than oversaw the Main and Bellevue branches for five years. He celebrated MPL’s 125th anniversary, started a mobile library service, started a free children’s summer lunch program with Toni’s Kitchen and helped the Bergen County Cooperative Library System launch its own regional interlibrary courier service.
The 20-year library professional was bestowed with WiFiForward’s inaugural Wi-Fi at Work Award, a New Jersey State Library multicultural programming award and two programming grants from the American Library Association.
Coyle said that the current funding stalemate between the library trustees and the township government has nothing to do with his departure. The trustees had asked for $400,000 above the state-calculated $2.8 million municipal funding minimum.
The township administration, however, has held up part of that extra $400,000 until the trustees sign off on the recommendations of a $30,000 Nov. 14 forensic audit.
BELLEVILLE – The township government’s Dec. 8 response to an anonymous handbill of that night’s planning board application may be considered as the latest entry in “fighting fire with fire.”
The township’s response to a “Stop Overdevelopment of High-Rise Rental Buildings” handbill, that was put into mailboxes in an area bordered by Graylock Parkway, Bell Street and Union and Overlook avenues the days before, was posted on BellevilleNJ.org. An intentionally blurred copy of “Stop Overdevelopment” was posted alongside the reply.
An unblurred copy, posted elsewhere, urged residents to “share your views and concerns” about a proposed 29-unit building for 524 Union Ave. There would be two-street-level commercial spaces, 21 one-bedroom apartments and six two-bedroom units.
The handbill’s contents include: “The Mayor and his Team are giving some rich developers tax breaks (PILOTS). 95 percent goes to the town, five percent to the county and ‘0’ to our schools.”
The township’s reply is that “there is no tax abatement or PILOT for this address before the Mayor and Township Council,” that the project is not a high-rise and that the application had been postponed from Dec. 8 to “January.” (or projected for Jan. 13). Anyone who knows of the person(s) leaving the handbills in mailboxes are to call the Belleville Police Department.
The odd part of this exchange is that an anonymous handbill is being countered on the township website – without attribution. It is not known whether Mayor Michael Melham, appropriate Township Council members or Belleville administrators have authored the posting.
