TOWN WATCH
WEST ORANGE – Township residents who remember Christina Yuna Lee, 35, joined those from Millburn, Manhattan and elsewhere in celebrating the music platform producer’s life and her Feb. 13 violent murder.
Past and president township residents remember the Lee who went to Pleasantdale (now Kelly) Elementary and Roosevelt Middle schools through her freshman year at West Orange High Schools. Those here and in other states said Lee was artistic, creative, caring and kind. Lee’s family, however, moved to Millburn before her sophomore year.
The Rutgers University graduate – who previously worked for an NYC art gallery, Tom’s Shoes and Marriott – became the senior creative producer for the online music platform Splice. Lee moved into a sixth-floor walk-up apartment at 111 Chrystie St. in Manhattan’s Chinatown from New Jersey last year.
Street security recordings show Lee being dropped off by a ride-hail driver 50 feet before her front door 4:20 a.m. that Saturday. A man came out from a nearby alcove and quietly followed her up all six flights of stairs and pushed both of them into her apartment while she was unlocking the door.
Responding EMS technicians told arriving NYPD officers that they had to break down the barricaded door and found Lee with more than 40 stab wounds to her torso and signs of a struggle. Lee was declared dead at the scene.
They also found the suspect, who also suffered stab and struggle wounds, hiding under Lee’s bed. They also found a bloodied kitchen knife. The suspect, 28, is being held on murder charges – but, as of press time, not as hate crimes.
A capacity St. Michael’s Catholic Church, sanctuary of mourners witnessed or participated in Lee’s Korean language Funeral Mass Feb. 18 in Palisades Park. A GoFundMe.com has been established to start a Lee memorial fund for the likes of SafeWalk escorts and urban open spaces. Runners have been taking one-mile fundraising laps past 111 Chrystie St. Feb. 21 and the next 34 Mondays in her honor.
NEWARK – The Newark Police Division continues to mourn the loss of 21-year Off. Waldemar Arocho, going by the mourning bunting still up in front of the Donald M. Payne, Sr. Police and OEM Headquarters as of Feb. 17. The headquarters, in the South Ward, is also the NPD Fifth Precinct where Arocho, 42, was last assigned.
Arocho had also been assigned to NPD’s North, West and Central wards’ narcotics units since being sworn onto the force Aug. 1, 2001. Newark Public Safety Director Brian O’Hara said that Arocho had died in University Hospital Jan. 31 of “an illness unrelated to his job.”
Waldemar Arocho was born in Mayaguez, P.R. and lived there until parents Wilfredo and Carmen moved here in 1988. He had graduated with the 107th Newark Police Academy Recruit Class.
Capt. Rasheen Peppers, who retired as Fifth Pct. Commander Feb. 1, recalled one of the times Off. Arocho went the extra step when UniverSoul Circus came to Weequahic Park last autumn. He raised money among his colleagues, said Peppers, so that “local kids without addresses can buy refreshments and souvenirs with their free tickets.
Brothers Wilfredo (Jr.) and Richard also joined “Newark’s finest.” Son Angel Arocho, 18, daughter Narirahiz Vega, 22, are also among his survivors.
Arocho’s remains were interred at North Arlington’s Holy Cross Cemetery, after a Funeral Maas at St. Lucy’s Church here, Feb. 8.
IRVINGTON – Township fire inspectors are investigating three separate blazes that displaced at least 26 people among nine days here Feb. 12-20.
An IFD incident commander needed to pull a second alarm upon arrival at a fire at 109 Berkshire Place Feb. 20. One person was taken to a local hospital for an unspecified injury. The 2.5-story wood frame house was seriously damaged.
IFD units responding to a fire at 77 Park Place 2:19 a.m. Feb. 14 found the top floor of the four-story brick apartment building ablaze. While “Irvington’s bravest” kept the flames from reaching adjacent buildings, its spread to the roof via the cockloft made it a stubborn fire to quench.
The building’s 24 occupants were temporarily housed by the local American Red Cross chapter.
Township firefighters promptly rescued two residents who were trapped while 11 Ellis St. was ablaze 10:10 p.m. Feb. 12. They saw the pair as well as flames coming from the second of the wood frame house’s 2.5 stories.
Rescuing firefighters turned the duo to arriving EMS technicians who then took them to Newark’s University Hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening smoke inhalation.
IFD units brought the house’s two-alarm fire under control shortly afterward.
EAST ORANGE – A city resident and practicing attorney is calling for banning carotid artery neck restraints and chokeholds be barred from citizens’ arrests after a recent incident in an Atlantic City pharmacy.
Tracey Cosby was in one of two of Atlantic City’s Walgreens when she saw two Caucasian men making a citizens’ arrest by “slamming a homeless elderly, mentally ill man of color onto the floor.” One man, wearing a black coat. pinned the person’s right hand and the other, in a green coat, put one of his knees on the subdued’s neck.
Cosby – former municipal judge for two towns and previously president of the NAACP Branch of the Oranges and Maplewood – began recording the pinning just before the man on the floor began to shout, “I can’t breathe.” The man in green shouted to the bystanders, “Can you tell them (the police) to hurry up?”
Cosby identified herself as an attorney, called for the police and told the man in green, “He can’t breathe, you’re on his neck – he could die.”
The attorney said the man in green spewed epithets at her, including, “liberal.” He did not let up on the prone man’s neck until he noticed Cosby’s cell phone.
ACPD officers arrived to take the pinned man into custody. Customers said that he tended to make threatening words and gestures; some questioned his sanity.
The officers, said Cosby, “seemed to have been informed that the vigilantes were law enforcement – although they were not.” It is not known whether the subdued man was charged with anything. The man in green and man in black remain at large.
ORANGE – “Orange’s bravest,” with the help of colleagues from eight towns plus the Orange Police Department and DPW, put out a fire that ripped through a longstanding South Ward auto body shop here Feb. 15.
The first OFD units, dispatched to Fine Finishes Body and Fender Collision at 11 p.m. that Tuesday, found “a fire with small explosions” within 617 Scotland Rd. The battalion chief pulled a second “all OFD hands” alarm and a third for mutual aid.
Home fire units began evacuating adjacent buildings and attacked the blaze from Scotland Road and Beach Street until Montclair and Millburn brought their latter trucks.
Both “MFD”: units directed their aerial cannons on the L-shaped building’s roof. Heavy embers, however, threatened to set fire to the roofs of 613 Scotland Rd. and 518 Beach St.
Additional units from Montclair, South Orange, Maplewood, West Orange, Irvington and Belleville were also supplied mutual aid Nutley HazMat was called in due to paint and other chemicals inside the shop. Its smoke wafted across the Orange/West Orange Valley into Montclair and Glen Ridge.
OPD units rerouted all traffic between Tremont and Heywood avenues; buses on NJTransit’s No. 92 and CoachUSA’s No. 44 routes were among the detoured. DPW trucks spread salt on adjacent streets to minimize freezing.
SOUTH ORANGE – A village resident, as of Feb. 16, learned that a Presidential pardon does not shield him from similar state-level charges.
Ken Kurson, 53, took a plea bargain in New York State Court Feb. 16 by confessing to a count each to misdemeanor computer trespass and attempted eavesdropping.
Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Josh Hanshaft accepted the plea on the condition that Kurson performs 100 hours’ community service leading to the charges being downgraded to harassment.
“The defendant is to lead a law-abiding life,” said Judge Hanshaft to the former “New York Observer” editor.
Kurson had been accused by state and federal attorneys of attaching spyware onto his then-wife’s computer to monitor her Facebook and Gmail accounts September 2015-March 2016. He allegedly sent transcripts of her online conversations with a friend, a summer camp employee, to the camp’s director.
What started out as a criminal complaint by the wife to South Orange police led to Kurson’s separate arrests and arraignment at federal and state courts. The friend of Donald J. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner received a Presidential pardon from Trump in his last days in office.
MAPLEWOOD – A former NJTransit driver, in New Jersey Superior Court-Newark’s Chancery Part filings has accused a Maplewood-Hilton Bus Garage supervisor threatened to fire her if she did not have sexual favors with him.
The driver said that the supervisor called her into his office in 2010 to discuss her latest accident when he allegedly offered, “You take care of me and I’ll take care of you,” in order to make the latest accident go unreported.
What the driver’s attorney called “leveraged coercion” led to the driver and her supervisor having sexual encounters in his personal car and in a parked bus. Those trysts ended when the driver told the supervisor’s wife.
Word of the said favors got out to her colleagues, however, by then. Other garage employees began harassing her, including a forced touching incident by a regional supervisor. She called the Employee Assistance Program but “no reasonable action was taken.” She eventually resigned under the hostile work environment in 2011.
The driver, who was hired by NJTransit in 2007, had been on notice by the bus operations and personnel departments in 2010 that she was liable to lose her job on the basis of her previous accidents.
The driver and her lawyer filed the complaint for unspecified damages and “corrective action to stop and prevent sexual assault and missed conduct in the workplace.” The suit was filed on November 2021 – within the two-year extension of limitations regarding sexual assault signed by Gov. Phil Murphy in 2019.
NJTransit, the nation’s largest statewide public transit carrier, citing ongoing litigation and personnel issues, declined comment on the publicized filing.
BLOOMFIELD – The owners of the Lunch Box Deli, after 26 years, have locked up and turned 176 Broad St. over to the owners of Manouche & Co. next door Feb. 16.
Co-owners Anthony Lauro and John Getchell, except for a six-month Bloomfield High School COVID lockdown. had been serving the likes of breakfast sandwiches and cheesecake continuously from 1996 until Feb. 15.
The owners’ clients included the BHS community, Bloomfield Public Schools administrators and the Presbytery of Newark – all within a block of their address. Lauro said he sees children of BHS returning with their own children over the decades.
While most of the customers returned, Lauro said, none of their original staff did. Getchell, the Lunch Box half of the partnership, then decided to retire.
Manouche owner Elie Chalet, who has since added breakfast sandwiches to his menu, intends to expand into the once karate school space by April 1. Lauro is still selling his cheesecake at 71 Washington St., just off Bloomfield Center’s Five Points.
GLEN RIDGE – The borough’s public library board of trustees will be welcoming their next library from the south on March 14 – the Ides of March.
Tina Marie Doody is coming from the Plainfield Public Library, most recently as assistant director. She had been with PPL since 2009.
Doody, however, is no stranger to here or the “Local Talk” area. She had been a Montclair Public Library reference librarian among her previous 18 years of experience.
The new director holds a Master of Library Science and communication and political science dual degrees from Rutgers University.
Doody succeeds Interim Director Cindy Czesak, who came aboard Jan. 2. Czesak filled in for 11-year GRPL Director Jennifer Breuer, who left to run the Johnson City, Tenn.-based Holston River Regional Library.
MONTCLAIR – Township detectives are looking for the man who stole the same car twice, minutes apart, from an Edgemont section parking lot here on Feb. 12.
The Lincoln’s Birthday blotter started with the driver of a 2019 BMW X4 parking in the Quick Check lot and left it unlocked and with her 11-year-old son inside.
The wanted man entered the BMW, noticed the child inside and immediately got out.
Then the boy left the vehicle to tell his mom in an adjacent store on just what happened. The thief retakes the otherwise unoccupied car and drives off west on Van Vleck Street.
Newark police, based on MPD’s description later found what BMW calls a “sports activity vehicle” abandoned in their city.
Wanted is a man described as 5-ft., 8-to-10 in. tall, wearing a grey sweatshirt with its hood pulled over his head. He was also wearing a light blue face mask “over the lower portion of his face.”
BELLEVILLE – A Toms River man was met by members of his hometown’s police while he was being released from RWJBarnabas Health’s Clara Maass Hospital here Feb. 7.
Giordano’s presence here may have been tipped off to TRPD after his other unintended stop along Bloomfield’s stretch along the Garden State Parkway earlier that Monday. The NJ State Police trooper, who was handling Giordano’s GSP accident, may have informed Toms River–who had a warrant out on him.
The Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office had issued a warrant on Giordano for causing a false public alarm in Toms River Feb. 5. Township police officers found a car battery, a power inverter and a string of blue LED lights running into an open bleach bottle with some liquid within along a part of Hooper Avenue 9 p.m. that Saturday night.
The battery, inverter LED string and bottle ran from Ocean County’s courthouse and administration building, prompting TRPD to close Hoover Avenue. A Berkeley Township HazMat and the NJSP Bomb Unit joined TRPD and the Ocean County Sheriff’s Office K-9 unit in determining that the device was not explosive or hazardous.
How Giordano, 36, was tied to the above is not publicly known. A Monmouth County grand jury had indicted him Aug. 13 for making terroristic threats and a false public alarm April 12. The threats against “Ocean County Judiciary” were made on his “Toms River Police are the Best” YouTube channel clip which also featured his earlier arrest for painting a blue line on Hooper Avenue.
Police said they searched Giordano at Clara Maass – and found what they said was “methamphetamine, alprazolam and drug paraphernalia” on him. He was arrested for the said possession and remains held in the Ocean County Jail.
NUTLEY – Township detectives are asking the public’s help in finding the man who had shoplifted from the Nutley Park Shop-Rite and drove away from one of its parking lots on Feb. 5.
This was no ordinary shoplifting in that the suspect left with what supermarket managers said was a shopping cart with $1,843.03 in merchandise.
Store surveillance cameras observed the man park his gray or silver Nissan Altima in the southside lot across Franklin Avenue and entered the Shop-Rite. He picked up a cart before or while in the store.
The suspect had somehow evaded the checkout front end, loaded the goods into the Altima and drove away.
The suspect is described as “a dark-complexioned male wearing a black vest, black hat (with a white triangular logo), gray sweatpants, gray hooded sweatshirt. and a mask.” He appears to be holding a cell phone while inside the store.
