TOWN WATCH
IRVINGTON – A prayer vigil and rally were held at Ellis and 19th avenues June 10 for comfort and outrage.
The comfort was for the 11-year-old neighborhood boy and his mother who were victims of a predator in the neighborhood. The outrage was double; one that the act had happened and the other for authorities not informing the community of the suspect’s presence.
That the suspect – Caream Davis, 46, of Irvington – was arrested by U.S. Marshals in Richmond, Va. June 7 and has been charged by ECPO on 11 assault and related counts and, as of June 18, awaits extradition – is of mild comfort for the neighbors and community activists from Irvington and Newark.
Essex County Prosecutor Theodore “Ted” Stephens II and Irvington Public Safety Directors Tracy Bowers said that township police were called to the block June 3. The mother and son then told about their ordeal., which brought in the county’s Special Victims Unit.
Although authorities have not given details, a video recording of the suspect dragging the boy out of his Ellis Avenue address went viral on the Internet – angering the community. The mother told WPIX 11 News that her son was finishing walking the dog when the suspect approached him, dragged him to the backyard and sexually assaulted him while threatening to kill him if he spoke out. The suspect then entered the address, punched her and tried to assault her before she screamed, and he fled.
Davis has been charged with two counts each of first-degree aggravated sexual assault, second-degree aggravated assault and third degree endangering the welfare of a child. He has also been charged with a count each of first-degree attempted murder, first-degree kidnapping, second-degree attempted sexual assault, third-degree criminal restraint and third-degree making terroristic threats.
Mayor Anthony “Tony” Vauss told activists early June 10 that he had met the victims’ family. Although Vauss told the activists that the mother did not want the rally, she had granted her blessing for the Prayer Vigil for Healing and Unity in the Community.
NEWARK – Water service was restored June 14 to the residents of 22 properties who found themselves in the crossfire over a nearly $1 million payment bill between the city and their landlord. The water was restored after 48 hours – and five days before a forecasted June 18-21 heatwave.
Newark Water and Sewer Utilities Director Kareem Adeem said that the shutoffs were a last resort in getting Boomers Investment Group, LLC, of Newark, to pay $45,978.41 in arrears. Boomers’ last payment was in October. Boomer owns and manages properties in all but the East Ward.
“Water is not free; people have to pay their bills,” said Adeem that Friday. “I know it’s terribly unfair to the tenants but, at some point, these landlords leave us no choice but shut off the water. It’s a drastic step but one that usually brings these landlords to the table with some good faith effort on paying the bills.”
Newark Water and Sewer had been employing last resort shutoff since its COVID-19 moratorium was lifted in October 2022. Adeem, in September, said that $24 million in federal COVID aid for bill payment had been exhausted.
“Local Talk” had bound two accounts of such shutoffs in the North Ward. The taps were turned off Sept. 15 at 555 Mt. Prospect Ave., for example, for allegedly owning $400,000.
Since water is needed for consumption, sanitation and fire suppression, the shutting off creates an instant health hazard.
Shutting off Boomer’s 22 properties, however, may be the single largest one.
Residents in 103, 109 and 128-132 Chancellor Ave. and at 104 Montclair Ave. said that they had no advance shutoff notice and they had kept their rent, including utilities, current.
A spokesman in Boomers’ management office said, on June 14, that they are usually closed on Wednesdays and Thursdays.
EAST ORANGE – A city man has been remanded to Newark’s Essex County Correctional Facility since what West Orange Police said was a June 12 confession to a May 1 bank robbery at the latter township.
WOPD Det. Geovanni Loreto and his colleagues had arrested Bryant Goodwyn, 25, at his home here June 11 and brought him to the West Orange Law and Justice Building at 60 Main St. Loreto said he had linked Goodwyn, 25, to the May 1 robbery of the Ascendia Bank after witness interviews, “hundreds of hours of electronic video analysis and in-person surveillance.”
Witnesses and in-store video recordings told of a masked man entering the bank branch at 83 Northfield Ave. at 9:21 a.m. that Wednesday. The suspect handed a note to a teller, “demanding a specific amount of money and threatened that he had a weapon.”
The teller turned over the cash and the suspect fled east on foot.
Bryant has been charged with second-degree robbery by threat or fear of bodily injury, criminal mischief and contempt of court; violating a domestic violence order by a crime or by a disorderly person’s offence.
ORANGE – Firefighters swiftly put up mourning bunting here at the Marty De Marzo Fire Headquarters and lowered its flags to half-staff June 9 for one of their departed colleagues.
Robert W. Seibel, Jr., 78, a former 25-year Orange Fire Department member, died that Sunday at Manahawkin’s Southern Ocean Medical Center. He had retired to nearby Little Egg Harbor in 2000.
Seibel joined “Orange’s Bravest” after his honorable discharge from the U.S. Marine Corps in 1970. The Orange native had enlisted in the USMC in 1966 and served in Vietnam.
Seibel and his late first wife raised three sons in Orange while being a city firefighter before retiring in 1995. He briefly lived in Bloomfield before going to Little Egg Harbor.
In retirement there, he was a member of American Legion Post No. 493 and Mystic Islands MICA club.
Sons Christopher, Kevin and Keith Seibel and Craig and Eric Johnson, grandchildren Sarah and Ryan Seibel are among his survivors. His Ju, followed by a military ne 19 funeral at Tuckerton’s Wood Funeral Home followed by a military burial at Wrightstown’s Brigadier Gen. William C. Doyle Military Cemetery.
WEST ORANGE – The township’s topology along the Watchung Mountains would change should the West Orange Planning Board, on July 10, grant the Goddard School permission to replace “a former radio station” with a similarly sized school or child care building.
GBS LLC aka The Goddard School wants to demolish a three story broadcast studio and transmission room and two radio towers here at Mt. Pleasant Ave. In its place on Block 83, Lot 1 and 5.01 would be a three story building which would serve as a separate annex to its existing one-story school or childcare building.
West Orange’s planners, on Aug. 2, 2017 granted permission to Goddard to replace a 2007 fire-damaged Mt. Fuji Steak House with the 8,800-square-foot single story Goddard Center. The restaurant at Mt. Pleasant and Prospect avenue’s northeast corner started out as McLoud’s Hotel and Restaurant in 1912 and perhaps best known as the 1945-78 Mushroom Farm.
It appears that Goddard recently bought the .0574-acre lot and that Family Radio, of Oakland, Calif., is moving its last station – WQXR 1560 AM – to share WOR’s antenna in Rutherford. WQXR stopped broadcasting March 4, ending a 95-year run for those call letters, and filed a “notice of consummation” to the FCC Feb. 29.
Family Radio, in a winter 2023-24, proposal to the FCC, asked that they operate on 500 watts 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. weekdays when Goddard was open and up to 1,000 watts the rest of the time. Goddard had been complaining that the broadcast transmission was interfering with the center’s electronics.
Family Radio sold the station for $50.1 million to Cumulus Media, and Cumulus, of Atlanta, leased the building back in 2013. Its WFME 94.7 FM station had been there since 1963. The site was a 5,000 watt transmitter for several FM stations going back to WAAT in 1948 and including WRXP (in 2013), WNSH NASH FM (2013-17) and WXBK “The Block” (2017-21) and (briefly) WHTZ. 100.3 FM.
SOUTH ORANGE / MAPLEWOOD – Kaitlin M. Wittleder, one of South Orange-Maplewood School District’s two vice presidents, decided on June 10 that she is one and done as a school board member.
Wittleder, of Maplewood, announced that Monday that she will not seek a second three-year term Nov. 5. and that she will run out her term on or around Jan. 1.
Wittleder did not state why she had decided to leave the two-town board in her nine-paragraph open letter to the community. She did thank “each and every one of you who have been a guiding force in shaping our school district for the better. Your ideas, your passion and your commitment to our students have been truly inspiring.”
Those thanks included fellow board members, “dedicated teachers and staff” and wished “the incoming Superintendent (of Schools Jason Bing) well. Her appreciation for the said classroom level staff and teachers developed when her children entered the district during her 2021-24 term.
She also encourages prospective board of education candidates to apply for petitions before the July deadline.
BLOOMFIELD – A Watsessing Avenue resident told responding Bloomfield Police officers June 6 that she had just arrived to find her car parked in the middle of the avenue instead of her driveway.
She also noticed that her parents’ Land Rover, which was usually parked on the same driveway, was missing. Going inside the kitchen, she found its window forced open and the Land Rover’s keys missing.
BPD officers, detectives and the shift dispatcher promptly put out an all points bulletin on the Land Rover. The SUV owner had meanwhile. tracked the missing vehicle to Union Township.
Both Union and Bloomfield police found the SUV unoccupied. It was returned to its owners, after it was dusted for fingerprints and combed for evidence.
The presumed car theft suspects, based on how the cars were moved off the driveway, remain at large.
MONTCLAIR – Town Manager Michael Lapolla may well put the currently vacant Montclair Fire Station No. 3’s future near the top of his priority list for incoming Mayor Dr. Renee Baskerville and the all-new Municipal Council.
The 1901-built station at 151 Harrison Ave. is well-tended on the outside but has a “Temporarily Closed” sign on its door. Its personnel and equipment, since last July, have been quartered at the Montclair Fire Department Headquarters on Pine Street.
The red brick castle-like building at the northwestern corner of Harrison and Cedar avenues had been housing firefighters who had been responding to calls in the Nishuane Park neighborhood and major clients like the 1950-2006 Montclair Community Hospital. They had also responded to mutual aid calls from West Orange’s Watchung Hills section and other adjacent towns.
In 2020, the council allocated $500,000 for station improvements. The bulk of that fund went to preserving its exterior. Lapolla, in response to Fourth Ward Councilman David Cummings’ May 13 query about the station, said that it’s being empty would require “another $700,000 to $800,000” to bring it up to habitation.
Station 3, also called the Cedar Avenue Firehouse, is not deficient to the township code or safety standards. It is not a designated Montclair historic landmark, although it is featured on several master plans.
A 2021-22 architectural evaluation showed that the building, first constructed for a horse-drawn wagon, was straining under the weight of its 30-ton fire engine and lacked an exercise room and other amenities. There was a discussion and a $24,950 allocation to Connelly and Hickey AIA to draw up an expansion plan.
That expansion would consume part of the municipal Nishuane Park.
The two African American firefighters, in their 2022 lawsuit against MFD, however said that their reassignment to Montclair’s oldest active firehouse was meant for retribution to their complaints.
BELLEVILLE – Outgoing Superintendents of Schools Dr. Richard Tomko may leave behind a parting gift for Mayor Michael Melham – a 1979 recording of Cliff Richard’s “Isn’t Funny How We Don’t Talk Anymore.”
Melham was asked by a public speaker at the Township Council’s June 4 meeting if it was true that Tomko had tired three times to meet with the mayor to ask him about ongoing residential development’s impact on BPS school enrollment.
Melham said that he did not know of Tomko’s attempts and that such a meeting would be moot anyway. The mayor said that, since most of the new apartment housing are studio and one-bedroom units, there would be no new children going to Belleville schools.
Tomko, in late 2023, based his proposed 2024-25 school budget in part on his projected 628 more students over the next decade – 258 from the new developments. That budget was finally drafted by State Monitor Thomas Egan after the Board of Education Trustees, on a May 7 tie vote, failed to pass one.
The final outlay does not include Tomko’s sought-for township backing of a $3.75 million physical improvement bond issue. The council, on Melham’s recommendation, voted 4-3 against the co-signing Jan. 23.; Melham said that BPS ought to put that bond up to a voter referendum. Tomko turned to the Essex County Improvement Authority for bond backing.
It is not known that the above, or a dispute with landlord Melham over BPS leasing 355 Union Ave. in 2021-23, are among the factors in Tomko quietly leaving for Garfield Public Schools on July 1.
Melham and Tomko, in earlier times, had forged shared service maintenance agreements between BPS and the Township. The Township, for example, is allowing the district to build a parking garage at the King window shop site at 279 Washington St. in exchange for allocating the otherwise Belleville Middle School deck to reserve a floor for public parking.
NUTLEY – The Nutley Public Schools district, as of June 17, have received a loan from the New Jersey Department of Education to fill their budget’s $7 million gap — but will it be enough to cover?
Superintendent of Schools Kent Bania announced NJDOE coming to their budget aid at the June 17 Board of Education. The zero-interest loan is to be paid back over the next 10 years.
State educators permitted the loan after a March audit discovered that NPS’ 2023-24 has a $7 million shortfall. Trenton, however, sent State Monitor Jeanette Makus to Nutley May 7 to diagnose what went wrong and to have veto power over future school budgets for an indefinite time.
Makus, in her initial May report, said that School Businesses Administrator David DiPisa had withdrawn from the current budget’s maintenance reserve account and applied it to other budget line items.
“The budget was over-expended but it didn’t show,” said Makus. “The reserves are gone – there’s no place to pull money from. And what has resulted is what exists today.”
The school board, that Monday night, approved Mike DeVita, formerly of the Lyndhurst district, as its new SBA. Bania and DeVita were Clifton High School class of 1995 graduates. DiPisa’s administrative leave will meanwhile run out June 30.
