TOWN WATCH
EAST ORANGE – Power and light, thanks to city officials’ over-the-weekend intervention, is still going to Prospect Towers Condominiums here at 275 Prospect St.
The city’s Department of Property Maintenance, including its Housing & Inspections and Code Enforcement divisions, negotiated with Public Service Electric & Gas to keep supplying the 210-unit building past the latter’s March 20 cutoff deadline and to arrange a payment plan.
Prospect Towers’ owners and tenants said that a utility employee posted a notice, announcing that its “Winter Termination Period” ended on March 16.
Where their money goes is unknown – except they suspect that it does not go to maintenance.
The residents and owners of the 16-story luxury apartment building have said that they have gone months without a maintenance crew or contractor. They had been paying their rent or maintenance fees on time to Royal Property Management, of Newark, but have few results to show for it.
The owners and tenants have long complained of repairs taking months to complete if they are done at all. The towers’ occupants are a mix of renters and condominium tenant-owners.
Royal has not responded to a reporter’s March 17 call for comment.
Then-Mayor Robert T. Bowser and his challenger Kevin Taylor came to Prospect Towers’ aid to keep its lights on and natural gas coming in 2009.
Prospect Towers have been an Upsala Heights neighborhood landmark since 1963.
NEWARK – Five men and a woman, all city residents, were arrested and charged in two separate out-of-county murders respectively going back to Aug. 7, 2022 and Sept. 2, 2019.
The Warren County Prosecutor’s Office and the State Police have arrested and charged on March 17 Mustafa Manns, 28, William Dixon, 24, and Nihir Rios-Figueroa, 30 with felony murder, murder, conspiracy and kidnapping. Manns and Dixon were also charged with aggravated assault and robbery; Manns and Rios-Figueroa with weapons offenses.
The trio is accused of kidnapping Quadree Bunch, 27, of Newark, beating and shooting him “execution style” and dumping his body along I-80 East on Aug. 7, 2022. An NJDOT maintenance worker found Bunch’s body off the shoulder of Milepost 16.6 in Allamuchy Aug. 9 – the same day Bunch was reported as missing.
The State Police arrested Manns along Lyons Avenue Jan. 19 “without incident.” Dixon has been held in the Essex County Jail since his Aug. 24 arrest for allegedly threatening Bunch’s associates. Figueroa had surrendered to Westchester County authorities in White Plains, NY Jan. 6 on unrelated charges.
Hudson County Prosecutor Esther Suarez, on March 6, said that Austin Be-Kwao, 25, Malcolm Horton, 36 and Khadijah Neal, 36, with first-degree murder and conspiracy thereof and second-degree weapons charges in the Sept. 3, 2019 Jersey City shooting of Lawrence Terrell Reid, 31 that led to his Nov. 20, 2020 death.
Responding Jersey City officers found resident Reid shot in the chest on Wagman Parkway between Bergen Street and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard 12:48 a.m. Sept. 2, 2019. Reid was rushed to the Jersey City Medical Center, where he died of complications Nov. 20, 2020. A celebration of his life was held at Harvest Temple COGIC, Dec. 2.
Be-Kwao is serving an eight-year prison term for a 2019 carjacking and sexual assault. Horton is on a five-year state term for robbery. Neal is detained in the Essex County Jail awaiting trial for weapons possession.
IRVINGTON – A preliminary investigation by township first responders to a March 5 two-car and motorcycle accident near an intersection here was caused by something that most two-wheeled vehicle operators fear.
Irvington police, followed by a local ambulance service and township firefighters, responded to a motorcycle accident on Lyons Avenue by Lincoln Place at 9:15 p.m. that Sunday.
The responders found a damaged motorcycle – and its rider beneath a car on the road. They also found a second car with one of its doors damaged.
It became apparent that the rider got “doored,” where the driver or a passenger of a parked car opens a door into the path of a rider. The impact in this incident forced the rider off the cycle and to slide beneath the second car.
IFD personnel extricated the rider and EMS took him to Newark’s University Hospital. The rider was admitted for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries.
ORANGE – Authorities have not disclosed further details of the man who was found dead March 13 in a car parked here on a South Ward street.
Orange police officers were sent to a car parked along Argyle Avenue, west of Scotland Road, at 5:30 that Monday. They summoned local EMS technicians when they found an “unidentified, unconscious and unresponsive man” within.
The man was declared dead at the scene. Results of his autopsy, including a toxicology report, remain pending from the Regional Medical Examiner’s Office in Newark.
The Orange Police Department would only add that no foul play was suspected.
It is believed that any further investigation is being handled by the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office. The ECPO has not confirmed or denied their figurative involvement.
WEST ORANGE – Reaction to the Supreme Court of New Jersey’s March 13 decision that invalidated the township’s Area in Need of Redevelopment designation criteria for the 1959/79 Wrest Orange Public Library building came from two contrasting sources the next day.
Mayor Susan McCartney said that municipal officials disagreed with the court’s interpretation over “immediate harm and detriment to the public.” The court, in Kevin Malanga v. Township of West Orange, had ruled that the municipality had failed to prove that said harm.
McCartney referred to the 2015 incident when the eastern brick facade of the 1979 annex cascaded onto the parking lot.
“The collapse came within minutes of seriously injuring one of our neighbors,” said McCartney. “The Court found that the fact that we took action to repair the brick facing meant that there was no immediate harm to the public. We respectfully disagree with that determination but hope that the Governor and New Jersey Legislature will carefully re-examine that law.”
Replacing the old WOPL at 46 Mt. Pleasant Ave. with a five-story senior citizen building and renovating 10 Rooney Circle by the Essex Green Plaza as the new library, said McCartney, will proceed as planned. Redeveloper Joe Alpert is to start demolition on or by April 1 and “ground will be broken for senior housing in the next 30 days.”
Our Green West Orange meanwhile has meanwhile argued that Township Attorney Richard Trenk’s losing Malanga v. West Orange should be grounds for the Township Council to show the 25-year municipal lawyer the door.
“We oppose the four-year appointment of Richard Trenk as Township Attorney,” said the environmental group on its website. “Trenk again lost big time when the NJ Supreme Court ruled that West Orange (led by Trenk who bills by the hour) violated public bidding laws by selling off our downtown library to his handpicked developer at a bargain rate. The Court declared that the library was NOT blighted.”
The council, on a split vote at its March 21 meeting, approved Resolution 80-23 that granted Trenk a new contract.
SOUTH ORANGE / MAPLEWOOD – It appears that a recently filed underage student sexual abuse allegation made against a former South Orange-Maplewood School District administrator is the latest in a string of suits on incidents going back to the 1980s in Bergen County.
A former student has named former South Orange Middle School and Columbia High School assistant principal Michael Healy for multiple counts of sexual abuse from 1997 to 2003. The plaintiff, now a California resident, also named SOMSD for “failing to protect him from Healy” under the State Child Sex Abuse Act.
Although the Feb. 9 filing in State Superior Court-Newark Feb. 9 is independent of four 2021 suits filed in Superior Court-Hackensack, the latest suit follows others’ accusations.
A former Mahwah High School student an Small Town and Fancy Players production member, for example, has accused Healey of abusing him while the latter was an MHS teacher and production director.
That student said that the abuse began “around 1989” when Healey offered him a lift home from a production, asked the student to lift up his shirt and “performed oral sex” on him. Healy’s abuse continued for four years.
The suit against Waldwick Public Schools comes from the 1980s when Healey was a substitute high school teacher and lunchroom monitor. The victim names the then-WHS choir teacher who informed him of Healy – but instead “openly flirted and sexually propositioned” that victim.
Neither SOMSD nor Healy’s lawyer responded to calls for comment. Healy is reportedly working as a Boonton area freelance magician.
BLOOMFIELD – The late scholar-athlete Frank Tripuka, since March 19, has joined his son Kelly in the NJSIAA Hall of Fame.
Frank Tripuka, 85, who died in 2013, was hailed in Sunday’s ceremony for his achievements in and beyond Bloomfield High School. The BHS Class of 1945 graduate was a star player on legendary championship Head Coach William Foley’s Bengals football teams. He was also a lettered player on BHS’s baseball and basketball teams.
Tripuka went on to play for the University of Notre Dame and as a 15-year professional on NFL, Canadian and American football leagues. He finished his career as the inaugural quarterback for the Denver Broncos of the new AFL in 1963.
Father Tripuka has been inducted into the BHS, Colorado and Polish halls of fame plus the Saskatchewan Rough Riders and Denver Broncos rings of fame.
The Broncos had retired Tripuka’s No. 18 jersey until they allowed Peyton Manning to wear it in 2012. Manning went on to help the Broncos win NFL Super Bowl 50 and set league passing records before retiring in 2016. No. 18 was then “re-retired.”
The NJSIAA had enshrined son Kelly in 2006. K. Tripuka, BHS Class of 1977, was named “The Greatest High School Basketball Player of the 20th Century.” The Notre Dame basketball “All American” went onto play for four NBA teams for 15 years.
Frank fathered Kelly, five other sons and a daughter in Bloomfield. All five sons played in D-1 level college sports.
MONTCLAIR – A recent Montclair High School graduate has been serving his 14-day federal prison sentence since March 15 for his part in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
Elias Irizarry, 20, was so sentenced in a Washington, D.C. federal court as part of an Oct. 25 pleas bargain. The MHS Class of 2020 graduate pleaded guilty to one count of picketing in the U.S. Capitol building and had to read a confession statement in exchange for the sentence.
Irizarry, on March 15, said that he made “the worst mistake of my life” and for allowing himself “to be on the wrong side.” He had been facing up to a year in prison but U.S. Department of Justice attorneys were asking for no more than six months time.
Upon release, Irizarry is to pay $500 restitution towards the $2.7 million in damage that Chad chaired MHS’ e may also reapply to The Citadel, a Charleston, SC military college where he had been suspended from since Dec. 23, 2022.
Irizarry, who had been studying political science at The Citadel, chaired MHS’s Teenage Republican Club. He spoke at the Oct. 15, 2017 Township Council meeting against a proposal to designate Montclair a sanctuary city; the council narrowly approved the declaration.
FBI agents arrested Irizarry in Charleston and charged him on counts of trespassing and disorderly conduct March 13-14, 2021. He was released on $25,000 bail.
Federal attorneys had identified Irizarry as among the crowd who overpowered U.S. Capitol Police officers and entered the building. A half-hour of footage had the metal pipe-carrying man walking corridors and taking pictures of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s statue in Statuary Hall. His mother testified that Elias thanked Capitol police on his way out and, once home, broke down.
GLEN RIDGE – New York City-bound St. Patrick’s Day revelers and regular riders got a passing trackside seat to NJTransit’s repairs from blown-down tree damage here at Glen Ridge Station.
Workers from six NJTransit work vehicles – two on the eastbound track and four parked outside of the station – were reattaching pulled-down overhead catenary wires during Friday’s off-peak hours.
All trains in both directions that day used the westbound track from Glen Ridge Station to Newark’s Roseville Junction. Station TVM access was barred during the eastbound platform’s closure.
That Friday’s condition was an improvement from 48 hours earlier when a tree on the Bank of America property’s northeastern corner was blown down just after 7 a.m. March 15. Four Montclair-Boonton line trains had to stop when its crews saw that the trunk, which had caught fire from power line contact, had fallen across the eastbound track and its branches across the westbound track.
NJTransit promptly called the Montclair Fire Department to put out the fire and dispatched its work crews to the station. All service between Montclair State University and Newark Broad Street was suspended and eight trains were canceled that day.
NJTransit brought in substitute buses between Glen Ridge and Newark Broad that Wednesday. Tickets and passes were also cross-honored by NJTransit and Decamp buses. Trains also ran on the westbound track March 16.
BELLEVILLE – It took The Smithsonian executive Lonnie G. Bunch III and 220 Belleville residents, officials and relatives to suspend author Thomas Wolfe’s “You Can’t Go Home Again,” adage for an hour here at Beech Street and Greylock Parkway March 20.
Bunch, Belleville High School Class of 1970, flanked by mother Montrose and younger brother, Gregg, witnessed Mayor Michael Melham reveal the “Lonnie G. Bunch III Way” traffic sign on the Greylock and Beech traffic island just after Noon Monday.
The sign honorarily renames the block on Beech where the pioneering historian was raised. Bunch said that March 20 was 100 years to the day when his grandfather, sharecropper-turned-dentist Lonnie Bunch I, moved into 125 Beech.
Lonnie III would play sandlot football, walk to Schools No. 5 and 6, go to BHS and become a Buccaneers football player. He was aware, however, that he and the Bunches were the only African American family on that block.
The honored Bunch became a noted historian, becoming the Smithsonian’s first African American secretary in 2019. He was the founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2005.
“’This is the first time I got a police escort into a park instead of out of a park,” quipped Bunch. “I love how Belleville has changed because I’m honored in a way. When I was 17, all I wanted to do was to get out of Beech Street – and now all I want to do is come back.”
NUTLEY – The absolute last chapter of the Nutley Volunteer Emergency and Rescue Squad may be written by the township’s Board of Commissioners with their April 4 public hearing and final vote.
Nutley’s elders approved the March 7 introduction of Public Safety Commissioner Alphonse Petracco’s Ordinance 3511. The measure will formally dissolve NVERS as an entity.
The independent non-profit squad ceased operations Dec. 31, 2022. Its assets and operation have been absorbed by the Nutley Fire Department’s pre-existing rescue unit.
Petracoo, on March 7, explained that NVERS had dissolved on Dec. 31 as a business but not as an institution.
“It’s with a heavy heart that I read this ordinance,” said Petracco. “The volunteers of the Nutley Rescue Squad, through the years I’ve been here, were excellent. Moving forward, I think the fire department’s doing an excellent job.”
