TOWN WATCH
NEWARK – Counseling here at North Star Academy’s West Side Park Elementary School is being offered while Newark Police Division detectives are investigating how a six-year-old boy came in with a handgun early May 16.
Newark Public Safety Director Brian O’Hara said that his officers responded to a 10 a.m. Monday call from 571 Eighteenth Ave. of “a minor in possession of a loaded handgun.”
Arriving officers soon “safeguarded” the gun. School administrators notified the child’s guardian for the boy’s pickup. School parents told an on-scene reporter that the boy “told friends that he was prepared to kill teachers in the building.”
“A West Side Park Elementary School student brought a weapon into the building,” said North Star’s Monday afternoon statement. “Teachers and Leadership were made immediately aware of the situation and the gun was confiscated. All students were safe and accounted for and instruction was able to be continued without interruption.”
The last time a student brought a loaded gun to a charter school was at KIPP Newark Collegiate Academy Charter School, 129 Littleton Ave., Oct. 1. The child was detained and the gun turned over to school security. NCA administrators were tipped off by an external caller; a classmate said the boy had been recently jumped outside of school.
NPD officers found that high school locked down – but it and the adjacent Newark Lab HS were closed Oct. 4 for “enhanced safety protocols.” Both schools reopened with installed metal detectors and additional security guards Oct. 4.
IRVINGTON – Authorities have identified a May 11 shooting suspect but not of a second victim of a May 15 shooting.
Acting Essex County Prosecutor Theodore “Ted” Stephens II and Irvington Public Safety Director Tracy Bowers identified the May 11 victim as township resident Jahque Benbow-Bruen, 23.
IPD officers, responding to 10 p.m. gunfire reports, found Benbow-Bruen shot at the Conoco gasoline station, 558 Grove St. Medics rushed him to University Hospital – where he died at 10:41 p.m.
Benbow-Bruen, said Conoco’s manager, was an employee but was not working that Wednesday night.
Authorities have not yet identified the man who was found shot and dead along Park Place early on May 15. Witnesses told IPD and ECPO detectives that the individual had just left a party there when several suspects shot him and fled.
Both shootings are being actively investigated.
EAST ORANGE – Both Stephens and East Orange Police Chief Phyllis Bindi said that their detectives are still looking for the suspect who shot and killed the employee of a First Ward corner convenience store here April 11.
Stephens and Bindi said that “an armed male” had entered the Samoja Grocery at 453 Springdale Ave. that Monday afternoon. That suspect shot the employee before fleeing on foot away from Springdale and Lincoln Street.
Samoja is better known as St. Michael Grocery, which has served the Upsala Heights neighborhood for decades. The corner store had recently changed names and awnings.
ECPO spokeswoman Carter, on April 19, identified the deceased as Gregorio Reyes, 60, of North Bergen. Guttenberg’s Barquin Funeral Home held a funeral for Reyes, who was born June 10, 1961 in the Dominican Republic, April 19.
Five children and seven grandchildren are among Reyes’ survivors. His remains were interred in North Bergen’s Weehawken Cemetery.
“I’m saddened to learn of the tragic shooting that occurred Monday afternoon at St. Michael’s Grocery Store,” said Mayor Theodore “Ted” Green. “I trust that our Prosecutor’s Office will ensure that those responsible will be brought to justice (and) I’ll be working with Police Chief Bindi to eliminate any threat of violence in our City. My deepest sympathy goes out to the victim’s family and all of those who feel this loss throughout our community.”
ORANGE – Salimishah Tillet’s May 10 receiving the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for criticism is the latest proof that the road to excellence runs through Orange.
The Pulitzer Prize Committee awarded Tillet that Tuesday morning for her work as contributing critic at large for the “New York Times” – “for learned and stylish writing about Black stories in art popular culture – work that successfully bridges academic and non-academic critical discourse.”
Tillet has been critic-at-large for the “Times” since 2015 – but had been writing essays since her first, on the Rodney King beating by police, while still in high school in 1991. One of her latest, on Jan. 7, was on the late Sidney Poitier’s “In the Heat of the Night’s” “slap heard around the world,”
Tillet’s commentary on race and popular culture has also been found on the pages of “The Nation” and “The Root” plus as an author since 2012. The Rutgers-Newark professor have been teaching courses on African and African Studies and Masters-level Creative Writing since 2004.
Salamishah, who was born in Boston, sister Scheherzde Tillet and mother Volora Howell moved to Orange in 1988. The elder sister began reading the “Times” as part of a Newark Academy social studies course.
Salamishah went on to get her BA degrees in English and Afro-American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, MA from Brown and PhD in the History of American Civilization.
Dr. Tillet, in her May 11 acceptance remarks at the “Times,” thanked her family including father Lennox Tillet, her late brother Shaka, life partner Solomon Steplight and their two children. Mother Howell still lives in Orange; the Steplight-Tillets live in Newark.
WEST ORANGE – Prosecutor Stephens and Essex County Sheriff Armando Fontoura said they have two out-of-state men charged May 11 in the March 4 murder of Kelsey Smalls here at Eagle Rock Reservation.
Michael Verdel, 71, of the Bronx, was scheduled to be arraigned before a State Superior Court judge May 16. Verdel has been remanded to Newark’s Essex County Correctional Facility since his May 11 arrest in New York City.
Verdel is being held without bail on the following first-degree charges: murder, murder during the commission of a crime, conspiracy, robbery through threat during the commission of a first- or second-degree crime, possessing a weapon without a permit and possession thereof for an illegal purpose.
Posley Sulamin, 31, of Detroit, may have been extradited to the county jail from Rikers Island when you read this. He is being held on a New York gun charge.
Sulamin is to be charged on counts similar to Verdel’s.
Authorities said that Smalls met Verdel and Sulamin in the Bronx and the trio drove to near a reservation hiking trail.
Hikers alerted authorities after finding Smalls’ shot body March 4. The Bronx man was declared dead at the scene.
SOUTH ORANGE / MAPLEWOOD – Six current and three recent South Orange-Maplewood School District Board of Education members may be spending more of their July before a Trenton ethics board than on school business.
The State Board of Education’s Ethics Commission has scheduled to hear two ethics complaints among the present and past board members on July 12 and, if necessary, July 14. The commission has not said whether it will take the complaints together or separately.
Board members Elissa Malespina and Johannah Wright had filed three charges against Board President Thair Joshua, First Vice President Susan Bergin, members Erin Siders and Courtney Winkfield and former members Shannon Cuttle, Annemarie Maini and Chris Sabin.
One charge is that Joshua, Bergin, Siders, Winkfield, Cuttle, Maini and Sabin passed an October moratorium resolution on student suspensions that Joshua had introduced. Malespina and Wright said that the resolution did not go through the board’s policy committee and that the measure overstepped the board’s function as a policymaker.
Malespina and Wright also charged that Joshua would not allow them to separate a tobacco use passage of a revised policy package they had “concerns” on. Joshua, they said, yelled at them at an adjournment before he realized that a board member’s dais microphone was on.
Maini has filed suit against Malespina, saying that the latter’s November Facebook post had asked voters two select two named board candidates. Maini said that Malespina should have stated that her endorsement was her own and that it may have violated a settlement between SOMSD and SOMA Black Parents Workshop.
BLOOMFIELD – A pair of Newark men may have appeared in municipal court to answer to separate possession of unpaid Home Depot-derived merchandise April 28.
Police officers, according to the BPD’s May 5 blotter report, met with the 60 Orange St. store’s Loss Prevention Officer – and a man identified as Luis Bonilla. Bonilla, 40, said the LPO, had loaded a shopping trolly with $1,775 worth of Ryobi and Dewalt power tools – and tried to leave the store with a fraudulent receipt.
Two other BPD detectives had meanwhile stopped a man – identified as Marcus Peay – who was pushing a Home Depot shopping cart along Bloomfield Avenue. The items in the cart, however, were not in shopping bags.
While one officer asked Peay for a receipt for the cart’s contents, the other ran a records check. Peay could not come up with a receipt; the records check came up with two outside outstanding arrest warrants.
Peay, thanks to a further discovery, may be referred to other municipal courts. The detectives said that had also found in his “possession credit cards, vehicle registrations, cell phones and key fobs not belonging to him.”
GLEN RIDGE – There are a few new details regarding the May 10 fatal car crash southeast of Bloomfield and Ridgewood avenues that have been revealed as of press time.
Officials from N.J. Attorney General Matthew Platkin’s office confirmed on May 12 that two people had died in the Hyundai Elantra with handicapped Pennsylvania license plates after it left eastbound Bloomfield Ave. and struck two of The Glen’s trees at 4:30 a.m. that Tuesday.
A third person remains in a local hospital. None of the three occupants’ identities have been revealed so far.
AG officials confirm that a marked Montclair Police Department patrol car was pursuing the Hyundai. and its two officers were attempting a stop. The office would not confirm or deny a WNBC News 4 NY report that the Elantra and/or its occupants were connected to an armed robbery on Carey Court.
Thousands of motorists, commuters, students, customers and employees were detoured around Bloomfield Avenue between Ridgewood and Hillside avenues until the AG’s office completed its field investigation at 10 a.m.
“Local Talk,” on May 14, found a flattened sign post, a tire track and a tree with part of its bark missing at the crash site.
MONTCLAIR – Members and leadership of the Montclair Education Association, vowing not to let the layoffs of up to 83 employees to go quietly, were to appear at May 16’s Montclair Pubic Schools Board of Education meeting.
MPS Superintendent Jonathan Ponds, at Monday night’s meeting, was to explain why he had authorized more staff cuts that morning when he had said he would lay off 26 nontenured staff and “some newly hired paraprofessionals at the board’s May 9 budget hearing.
The board passed that Monday a $125.49 million 2022-23 school budget. About $123.03 million would be raised in quarterly tax payments.
Ponds, at the budget hearing, said he was reluctantly laying off at least 26 staff members to fill a $3 million budget deficit.
“I’ve really gotten down to the last thing I could get down to,” said Ponds May 9, “and it comes to people.”
Ponds, on early May 16, said he had sent reduction in force notices May 13 to 35 teachers and 48 paraprofessionals. The super maintains that low early elementary school enrollment. Some of the 83, he said could be rehired over the summer.
The school board’s next meeting is set for May 25.
BELLEVILLE – The township’s planning board has put up a “Help Wanted” sign – for a new attorney – since their May 12 monthly meeting.
The board accepted the resignation of Rose Tubito, Esq. that Thursday night. Mayor Michael Melham said that Tubito, of Old Tappan, had sent him her resignation via email earlier that day.
Board Chairman Raymond Veniero had suspended the board’s operations at their April 14 meeting when questions on how six of its members had been appointed since 2019. Veniero, on April 14, plus Melham and the Township Council at their April 12 meeting, received the opinion of municipal land use law expert of Michael Kates.
Kates said that the township council appoints planning board members under the manager-council format – and not by the mayor. Melham said he had appointing power based on pre-1990 legislation in the township codebook. Belleville switched from a commissioner format in 1990.
Kates opinion was solicited by and delivered to both panels by former board of education trustee Michael Sheldon. Tubio, on April 14, advised Veniero to suspend the panel’s operations.
The council, on six 4-3 split votes, retroactively approved the six BPB members in question April 26. The measure was introduced by Melham with Tubito’s recommendation.
The board, with a newly-hired attorney, has a June 9 meeting.
NUTLEY – Township police top brass are advising owners of Ultimate Orbeez or similar gel pellet guns to leave them at home – and definitely not take them to school.
NPD officers were summoned to an unidentified school here on a student bringing a gun on the property May 5.
“Upon further investigation,” said the NPD in a May 13 release, “it (the gun) was determined to be an Ultimate Orbeez gun classified as a toy.”
Guns that fire Orbeez gel pellets, used by people to shoot unsuspecting other people, had been at the center of a controversy since the start of 2002. Reports of such incidents, allegedly part of a challenge posted on Tik Tok, have been reported here and elsewhere across the U.S.
Orbeez does not make the guns and TikTok said it had never issued an appeal for shooting video clips.
Nutley officers, on an April 3 pellets shot at passing cars call, found several juveniles using a homemade gun to fire gel capsules. That matter was turned over to the juvenile aid bureau and NPD issued a subsequent parental advisory.
