TOWN WATCH
NEWARK – Voters in the city’s East, South and West wards are to choose their respective Municipal Council members from among six candidates in June 14’s runoff election.
Participating East Ward voters, for example, are to choose between Anthony Campos and Michael Silva. Either one will succeed retiring longtime Councilman Augusto Amador. Luis Weber, who ran on Mayor Ras Baraka’s Moving Newark Forward 2022 ticket placed fourth in May 10’s initial results – and out of the running.
South Ward voters are to pick either “Moving Forward” runner Rev. Patrick Council or top challenger Terrance Bankston. Either one will succeed the retiring John Sharpe James.
West Ward voters have to decide between “Moving Forward” member Dupre Kelly and Chigozie Onyema. One or the other will replace Joseph McCallum, whose 2021 indictment on bribery charges rendered him a lame duck.
A winner in each ward gets at least 50 percent plus one of the votes. Their election will determine whether “Moving Forward” will have six or eight overall members on the Municipal Council come July 1.
Prospective voters are to contact the clerk’s office or the superintendent’s office to find their nearest polling station and whether there will be any early voting there on June 10-12. Questions on Vote By Mail Ballots and their drop box locations may also be made there.
IRVINGTON – Deliverance Jesus is Coming Church Bishop Vanessa Everett – with the assistance of Mayor Anthony “Tony” Vauss, Essex County Commission President Wayne Richardson (D-Newark), a representative of Cong. Donald M. Payne, Jr. and DJICC members – rededicated the northwest corner of Springfield Avenue and Harrison Place “Bishop James H. Everett II Way” Noon June 4.
The honorary street renaming honored Everett, who founded and shepherded DJICC here at 815 Springfield Ave. for 43 years.
Everett, who was born in Brooklyn Dec. 13, 1945, came to the Irvington-Newark area with a doctorate in sacred theology from United Christian College. The former actor was a disciple of Apostle Arturo Skinner (1924-75) at his Newark Deliverance Temple.
Everett, in August 2018, bestowed a service award to Newark’s Bethel Counseling Service and Worldwide Outreach co-founder Reginald C. Osborne here. Osborne, who was also a Skinner disciple, died Nov. 18, 2018.
After founding DJICC here, Everett became a prelate of the Deliverance Jesus is Coming Association of Churches. The “pastors’ pastor” provided coverage and ministerial services to 45 churches from as close as Newark and East Orange to as distant as Denver, Trinidad and Poland.
Everett was a South Orange resident when he died Jan. 24, 2020. A celebration of his life was held here Feb. 8, 2020, followed by a service the next day at Newark’s Wells Cathedral. Saturday’s street renaming was part of a weekend celebrating Pentecost and DJICC’s 46th anniversary.
Bishop and wife Vanessa, daughter Solange, grandson James Xavier and granddaughters Azjah Dale and So Miyah Skye are among his survivors.
EAST ORANGE – Acting Essex County Prosecutor Theodore “Ted” Stephens and Police Chief Phyllis Bindi have been asking for the public’s help in finding the person who shot a city man dead along a major Brick Church section street here June 3.
Responding EOPD officers told Bindi that they were responding to gunfire reports along the 500 block of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard/Main Street at 12:54 a.m. that Friday.
They found Melja T. Oliver, 37, lying on the sidewalk along the Brick Church Shopping Plaza. Oliver, who was rushed to Newark’s University Hospital, died at 1:31 a.m.
Demolition work around the plaza’s Shop-Rite was suspended for the weekend. The supermarket is usually open 24 hours a day.
Oliver’s funeral arrangements have not been announced as of press time.
ORANGE – Stephens and Essex County Sheriff Armando Fontoura posted a $5,000 reward on June 3 leading to the arrest and conviction of the driver who fatally struck a city man here May 14.
Felipe Chay, 46, was struck and killed by a southbound SUV on Scotland Road between Cary and Frankfort streets 10:54 p.m. May 14.
The wanted vehicle is a 2020-21 Toyota Highlander that is either “Moon Dust” or “Precious Galena” in color. It was last seen going south on Scotland before turning west onto a side road towards West Orange.
The Highlander had suffered driver’s side damage, including the loss of its outside rearview mirror. That mirror may have since been replaced.
Neither Stephens nor Fontoura had said whether they are looking for a second car that was initially reported as striking Chay. Last rites for Chay have not been announced as of press time.
WEST ORANGE – Last rites for a 24 year old resident who was found shot dead in Midtown Elizabeth May 29 have not been announced as of press time.
Responding Elizabeth Police officers told Police Director Earl Glenn that they responded to a gunfire report from the area of 200 North Broad St at about 3 a.m. that Sunday. They found Lamar Turner, 24, at the street corner with a fatal gunshot wound. Turner was declared dead at the scene.
EPD officers said they had also found a 21-year-old woman with a gunshot wound a block west along Julian Place. The woman, who was said in one report to have recently graduated from William Paterson University, was treated at Newark’s University Hospital for non-life-threatening injuries.
The incident closed North Broad Street between Julian Place and Morris Avenue to West Grand Street until Union County Prosecutor’s Office detectives had completed their field investigation. Early morning CoachUSA No. 24A and B buses were among the detoured traffic. Access to NJTransit’s Northeast Corridor and North Jersey Coast Line’s Elizabeth station was restricted.
SOUTH ORANGE / MAPLEWOOD – Columbia High School students’ walkouts here on June 3 and May 26 apparently drew different responses from school officials.
CHS students first left scheduled classes to converge on the high school’s Valley Street back lawn May 26. They walked out as part of National Gun Violence Awareness Day that Thursday. The walkout particularly focused on the most recent mass murder of 19 fourth grade students and two of their teachers at Uvalde, Texas’ Robb Elementary School.
On one hand, the walkout coincided with others held that day in 43 states and Washington, D.C. A news helicopter from CBS TV New York was among the covering media. Maplewood police squad cars provided crowd control.
The CHS Power Club led 800 students in a June 3 walkout to protest the anticipated U.S. Supreme Court’s rollback of its 1973 “Roe vs. Wade” abortion access ruling. That Friday walkout, which featured nine speakers on the school’s back field, started at 10 a.m.
The two-town high school’s main office, later that day, declared a yellow alert, which locked down the building until its scheduled dismissal. The alert meant that the 800 protesting students were locked out.
CHS parents are asking the school administration and the South Orange-Maplewood School District about what triggered the yellow alert.
BLOOMFIELD / GLEN RIDGE – Howard Johnson’s restaurants – whose “Landmark for Hungry Americans” here, four other “Local Talk” locations and more than 1,000 places in the U.S., Canada, the Bahamas and Japan – may have become a memory as of May 26.
Lake George, N.Y. ‘s “HoJo,” instead of re-opening for the summer on May 26, sprouted a “For Lease” sign on its parking lot. Owner Wyndham hotels and local leaseholder Joe DeSantis are willing to lease the eatery as a Howard Johnson’s – or let the gastronomic brand become history if the renter seeks a different use for the property.
When this last restaurant had served its last fried clams, “frankforts” and 28 flavors of ice cream is unclear. Some locals said it had closed in January, others in March. It had been holding on since the Bangor, Maine store closed in 2017.
Founder Howard Deering Johnson – who opened his first ice cream store in Quincy, Mass., in 1925 – knew something about location. He placed a HoJo at 710 Bloomfield Ave. Glen Ridge, around 1941. Stores at 275 Central Ave., East Orange; 616 W. South Orange Ave., Maplewood (its parking lot was in South Orange) and a restaurant/hotel at Newark’s 550 US Rt. 1-9 South followed.
Johnson also brought his restaurant to the Garden State Parkway Brookdale Plaza South, 1339 Broad St., Bloomfield, in 1955. He had made 40-year leases with at least seven toll roads. The sit-down standardized orange-roofed restaurant chain was the nation’s largest into the early 1970s.
Competition from fast food chains and the 1970’s fuel shortages began to cut into “HoJo’s” market share. The East Orange eatery was replaced by a Wendy’s. The Glen Ridge building was replaced by a Grand Union supermarket. The Grunings bought the Maplewood-South Orange store in 1946.
Howard Johnson’s lost their lapsed toll road leases; the GSP Brookdale South store became a McDonald’s. Marriott/Wyndham bought the family corporation in 1985 and separated the restaurants from the motor lodges – as in the case of the Newark Rts. 1-9 colocation.
MONTCLAIR – County prosecutors are weighing whether to file official misconduct charges against at least 10 Montclair firefighters who received payment for covering a colleague’s shifts in 2018 and 2021.
Nine of the 10 MFD members had admitted that they took payments from at least one of their fellow firefighters for covering the individual’s shifts.
Discrimination probe of Montclair Fire Department reveals a firefighter paying colleagues to cover his or her shifts those two years. A subsequent memo said that the recipients went to “counseling sessions” instead of taking demerits or other disciplinary penalties.
The “pay to cover” incidents were made after the department had issued a 2018 revision on attendance policy.
Montclair Affirmative Action Director Dave Morgan had delivered his report to ECPO earlier this month. Morgan had presented copies of his report first to Township Manager Timothy Stafford, the deputy manager, the township attorney, Township Council members and Montclair’s communication officer March 11.
Morgan’s report was ostensibly on his investigation on whether MFD’s Sept. 2-3, 2021 promotional exams were created and conducted to disadvantage African American firefighters and officers. At least two such officers have so claimed in November.
Morgan’s report is the first of two investigating the exams. The Township Council had authorized O’Toole Scrivo, LLC, of Cedar Grove to also investigate. The council are anticipating O’Toole’s findings as of press time.
BELLEVILLE – Township officers have been puzzling out who were the “out-of-district” teens who were on Belleville High School grounds May 26. One of the group, with the escort of a student, briefly got inside before fleeing with the rest of the “visitors.”
BHS Principal Caleb Rhodes said that students and teachers noticed “six students from a local area high school” who were seen sitting at a pavilion table outside the cafeteria that Thursday. Five of the six, after being identified as not of BHS, fled once they were spotted.
The sixth visitor, “who was not sitting with the five,” said Rhodes, “entered the building with a BHS student. When a staff member identified that person as not being from this student body, “ran out of the building through a door.”
Rhodes, in his May 26 open letter, said that BPD has “already implemented additional security measures to further improve the security of our students.”
Man in Clifton Kidnapping, Assault
A resident – identified as Andres Vasquez, 24 – may still be in Paterson’s Passaic County Jail when you read this.
Clifton police and the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office Sexual Investigations Unit arrested Vasquez June 3. He has been accused of entering a child’s bedroom through an outside window, “confined that victim in the room and strangled and explicitly assaulted the victim” in Clifton on May 31.
Vasquez has been charged with burglary, kidnapping, criminal restraint, endangering the welfare of a minor, criminal and aggressive explicit contact and explicit and aggravated explicit assault.
NUTLEY – Southbound Route 21 traffic was detoured for two hours here May 27 as the result of a car-truck collision that left both drivers injured.
Township police, firefighters and EMS technicians had responded that Friday to a report of a four-door gray Hyundai rear-ending a cement mixing truck south of Exit 8 – Park Avenue.
The first responders found the Hyundai in the left lane having suffered serious front end damage and its airbags having been deployed.
The Hyundai’s 17-year-old driver was extricated and taken to a local hospital for the treatment of non-life-threatening injuries. The truck driver also had a pain complaint.
