TOWN WATCH
NEWARK – People who are under 18 years old 11 p.m. – 5:30 a.m. overnight Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, starting May 3, should not venture outside of 100 yards of home into September.
Those who do go beyond 300 feet of home should be ready to state to city authorities that they are going to or from work or be accompanied by an adult or a guardian.
That is the substance of the Summer Safety Initiative 2024 that Mayor Ras J. Baraka had announced, after a week’s delay, at City Hall April 25. Although the measure has been annually announced since 1966, this year’s edition could be called, “Newark Youth Curfew 2.0.”
Newark police officers who encounter unaccompanied youth during those hours, said Baraka that Thursday, will be asked for a parental contact. The said youth will be picked up on-site by the Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery’s Wellness Response Team. Team members will be taken home, or if the parent cannot be contacted, to OVPTR’s Re-Engagement Center.
The said youth will be taken to a local hospital for medical clearance before being returned to the REC. Youth – or taken the N.J. Division of Child Protection and Permanency. OVPTR social and outreach workers will visit the families 24 to 48 hours after the NPD encounter.
Repeat incidents over a three month period could leave families with fines and/or reported to NJDCPP. The revamped program is being integrated with the mayor’s Summer of Hope programming and activities.
Summer of Hope includes trips to theaters, block parties, summer youth engagement, workforce development and increased police patrols.
IRVINGTON – Last rites for Valdaishia L. Simpkins – a funeral at Madison’s St. Vincent Martyr Church and burial at Summit’s St. Teresa’s Cemetery – was set for May 2.
Simpkins, 27, was killed by an errant tractor truck while she was inspecting a flat tire along Interstate 80 April 8. She was heading home here after spending Easter with her Pennsylvanian relatives.
Valdaishia La-Teifah Simpkins, who was born in Newark June 25, 1996, attended Northern Elementary before her family moved to Bernardsville. She attended Bernardsville’s middle and high schools before graduating with South Orange-Maplewood’s Columbia High School Class of 2004.
Simpkins may be best known for helping elderly and/or disabled passengers traverse Newark Liberty International Airport and board or disembark United or JetBlue flights. She was hired through contractor PrimeFlight and was training to become a TSA agent at the time of her death.
Parents Ormond Simpkins, Sr., of Irvington, and Rahseda Belinda Emma Harris, of Summit, brothers Ormond Simpkins, Jr. and Jaden Christopher Harris, sisters Shaquetta Valerie Simpkins, Bernadette Harris and Rasheda Mary Downing, daughters Lauryn Ariel Marshal and Lani Emma Blaise and paternal grandfather Cornell Simpkins, Sr. are among her survivors.
Simpkins’ Funeral Mass was simulcast on www.svmnj.org. Memorial contributions may be made towards her daughters’ fund.
EAST ORANGE – Although authorities from multiple law enforcement agencies have not said where they had apprehended him April 18, but he will be in Paterson’s Passaic County Jail for some time to come.
Eudys T. Santios-Toribio, 23, was picked up that Thursday by members of the Paterson Police Department Shooting Investigation Unit and the State Police and U.S. Marshals NY/NJ Regional fugitive task forces in connection with a Jan. 1 shooting in Paterson.
Paterson Police and the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office supplied information that had linked Santios-Toribio to the shooting of a Prospect Park woman New Year’s Day at Market and East 33rd streets.
His description was given to PPD officers by the victim, 25, while she was being treated at St. Joseph’s University Medical Center at 4:56 a.m. Jan. 1. She had suffered non-life-threatening injuries.
Santios-Toribio was charged with second and third-degree counts of aggravated assault, possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose and unlawful possession of a weapon.
ORANGE – Residents in and around the Orange Valley have been anticipating the results of a mural artist selection for the new PSE&G substation here since 3 p.m. April 27.
Orange stakeholders had the opportunity to select proposals from three Newark area artists here in person at the Forest Street Community School multipurpose room 1-3 p.m. that Saturday. Those who were unable to attend the session at 651 Forest St. could vote in advance or in absentia by a QC code on handbills posted by Arts Committee Orange and the Mayor’s Office.
Voters were to consider one proposal each from three Newark area artists: Jacob Mandel, Jazz Pena and Layqa Nuna Yawar. The trio were selected among several submissions received and reviewed, according to the advance press releases, by “Orange stakeholders ” and artists.
The awarded artist or artist team would receive a $50,000 commission to create a mural on a corner of the PSE&G “Orange Heights Switching Station” at 532-36 Freeman St. The three story mural would go up at the corner of Forest and South Jefferson streets.
The mural artist selection process was sponsored by PSE&G, the Mayor’s Select Committee on Art Installations Project and the OAC. The utility, as of April 30, has erected a 70-foot facade, resembling four-story apartment buildings, to surround the soon-to-be-completed switching station.
Orange’s Planning Board had approved the two-acre replacement of the former Mitchell-Supreme fuel oil facility in the Orange Valley Arts District with an extension of an existing substation in 2022.
WEST ORANGE – Construction on the new senior citizens building here at 46 Mt. Pleasant Ave has progressed to where the township will start taking residency applications on May 1.
Contractors for the township and redeveloper Joe Alpert have partially replaced the 1959-built West Orange Public Library with a five-story 65-unit apartment building. Demolition of the original WOPL began as soon as its replacement at 10 Rooney Circle, a former office building north of the Essex Green shopping plaza, was repurposed in January.
Remaining is the 1979-built WOPL eastern extension that overhangs the municipal parking lot. (They share a block with Township Hall, the Law and Justice Complex, the John P. Renna senior tower and the site of the old Gaston Street School.)
That 1979 annex is being repurposed as the new senior apartments’ community space. One of its to-be-announced uses may be a WOPL branch. Sparing the annex from demolition has an ironic note, since its Jan. 29 facade collapse was cited by township officials in 2022 as a reason for moving WOPL to 10 Rooney Circle. (The facade’s bricks pummeled two parked cars as its only damage.)
The project, financed by $20 million from the New Jersey Home Mortgage Financing Association’s Affordable Housing Production Fund, is still set to open later this summer. Housing for 60 of the units are for people at least 62-years-old. Five units are set aside for homeless people – who will have “wrap around” social services.
SOUTH ORANGE / MAPLEWOOD – The South Orange-Maplewood School District Board of Education ended a long April 25 budget presentation by passing its 2024-25 school budget on a 5-4 split vote.
What the school board passed that Thursday night amounted to a $4,041,835 increase on village and township taxpayers over the outgoing 2023-24 budget. The increase is part of the 7.86 percent of the SOMSD’s budget but to be made up through property taxes.
The budget – as revised by the two-town Board of School Estimate and presented by Interim Schools Superintendent Dr. Kevin Gilbert and School Business Administrator Eric Burnside – reflected inflation among maintenance, materials, transportation, home and out-of-district instruction. Student enrollment increased by 132 boys and girls over the 2022-23 school year. There was also an increase of 29 employees on the payroll from 2020.
The New Jersey Department of Education had the budget stay within the two percent increase cap but allowed SOMSD and its estimate board to keep a two percent increase on the current budget’s surplus. State and federal COVID funds, however, have been depleted.
To deliver a balanced 24-25 budget between May 15 and June 30, district administrators and the estimate board decide to lay off 28 employees; 18 through retirement or attrition and the rest discharged. (The administration first calculated 30 pink slips.) There were 35 percent cuts in textbook and materials purchase and in the arts department.
“Tonight’s not easy,” said Dr. Gilbert. “We were looking for the least impactful scenario for each department and building.”
Board President Qawi Telesford, First Vice President Arun Vadlamani and members Elizabeth Callahan, William Meyer and Shana Sackett-Gable carried the budget. Second VP Nubia DuVall Wilson and members Regenia Eckert, Bill Gifford and Kaitlin Wittleder dissented.
BLOOMFIELD – The best that can be said lately of the intended renovation of the former South Junior High School building here at 177 Franklin St. is that the developer is keeping its property taxes paid on time.
Urban Smart Growth, of Pawtucket, R.I. and Los Angeles, Calif., according to the township tax assessor records, had paid Block 335, Lots 26, 30, 72-73 up to the latest quarterly period. USG, under its Bloomfield Junior High School Urban Renewal LLC subsidiary, received township planning board approval Sept. 15, 2020 to convert the decades vacant building into “Bloomfield Lofts.”
Bloomfield Lofts would have 122 live/work apartment units, art studio/gallery space and the auditorium used for visual/performing arts and community space. The project calls for building additions out front and atop the school for 20,368 more square feet and five stories plus a parking garage for 171 parking spaces.
The 2020 approval and 2019 long term tax agreement with the township was welcome news to those who remembered when the school was closed June 30, 1986 and its community merged with Bloomfield Junior High School. A prior apartment plan was mulled in 2006.
Work on the 1939 Art Deco middle school, which had been projected for 12 months, had stopped for the entire 2023-24 school year so far.
It turns out that Urban Smart Growth’s founder and CEO, Lance J. Robbins, 76, had died Aug. 24. Robbins started his company by buying and rehabilitating 6,000 “distressed inner city apartments” in his native Los Angeles in 2004.
Robbins and USG brought their rehabilitation and repurposing philosophy to former schools, warehouses and factories to 13 cities in eight states – including JHS here. It is not clear as of press time whether other USG projects have been affected by Robbins’ death.
MONTCLAIR / GLEN RIDGE – First responders from the township and the borough broke up a fight between a pair of out-of-town men on the Montclair Public Schools Administration Building Parking lot April 12.
Although both were treated from their injuries, one man from Fairfield was arrested on aggravated assault and weapons possession charges.
The first Montclair police units came to 22 Valley Rd. on reports of two pickup truck drivers ramming each other on the lot at 8 p.m. They found two men fighting each other but one with a masonry hammer and a three-foot-long level.
MPD officers separated the pair and called for Montclair and Glen Ridge EMS. The man covered with blood – 58, from Randolph – said that he was told to meet a friend there when his pickup truck was struck from behind by the suspect’s truck. Both got out and began arguing.
Witnesses said that the suspect – identified as Giuseppe Iudici, 60, of Fairfield – took out his hammer and carpenter’s level to beat the victim about the head.
Montclair EMS took the victim to Paterson’s St Joseph Medical Center for treatment. Glen Ridge EMS and Montclair Police took the suspect to Mountainside Hospital for his treatment and later arrest.
Iudici was charged with aggravated assault, possession of a weapon for an unlawful purpose and unlawful possession. He was remanded to Newark’s Essex County Correctional Center until he had posted bail.
BELLEVILLE – Township police officers have one April 30 drug store burglary suspect in custody but are looking for two others who fled.
A BPD unit on patrol said that they had stopped at the Good Health Pharmacy, 305 Joralemon St., at 3 a.m. Tuesday after they had noticed “suspicious activity” inside. They saw three men – two of whom fled out the back door.
A third man – identified as James Lowe, 37, of Jersey City – was nabbed after a foot chase. He was arrested and detained in the Essex County jail on burglary and resisting arrest charges.
Although BPD has not given a description of the other two suspects as of press time, they had a 1999 Honda Odyssey impounded as evidence. A check discovered that the minivan was wearing fictitious license plates.
None of the pharmacy’s inventory has been reported as missing.
Lowe is being investigated for connection with any other recent drug store burglaries here.
NUTLEY – The case of the bank employee here who allegedly stole $105,000 in retirement benefits from a dead customer, said federal officials, has entered the sentencing phase.
U.S. Attorney Philip Sellinger, on April 18, said that Jorge Nova, 35, of Passaic, had pleaded guilty in federal court-Newark April 17 to one count of wire fraud before U.S. Magistrate Judge Evelyn Padin.
Nova was an employee of a commercial bank here in 2014 where one of his customers had received Social Security Administration benefits directly deposited to his account. Sellinger said that Nova did not inform SSI of his customer’s death and the monthly checks kept coming.
Sellinger said that Nova, until October 2018, tapped into the dead man’s account with fraudulent debit cards that he made out in the deceased’s name. He was also accused of creating a second account in the man’s name with “a money service provider” to withdraw funds from.
Nova’s sentencing by Padin is set for Oct. 8. He faces up to 30 years’ imprisonment and a maximum $250,000 fine.
