Queens Man remagines street with fence, gives DOT a taste of their own medicine

Woman beats down child rapist wanted by NYPD

 

The Daily Beast

A sweeping manhunt in New York City ended on Tuesday after 23-year-old Angela Sauretti recognized a man in a black hoodie who entered the 108th Street Grocery in Queens at 1 a.m.

Sauretti was all but certain this was the face she had seen on Instagram—in an NYPD wanted poster for a man suspected in the machete-point rape of a 13-year-old girl as she walked with a boy her age last week.

Sauretti called out to a friend who stood nearby who had also seen the police Instagram posting. She asked if this was indeed the man more than 60 detectives had been seeking since Thursday’s broad daylight attack in a park across from the victim’s junior high school.

“I pointed him out,” Sauretti told The Daily Beast. “I’m like, ‘Yo, that’s him?’ [The friend] said, ‘Yes, that’s him.’ That’s what confirmed it. And everything just spiraled from there.”

Sauretti grabbed the man in the hoodie.

“He tried to run, so I put him in a headlock,” she told The Daily Beast.

He continued to struggle and she took an opportunity to administer her own brand of street justice

“He got something that his mother should have done to him,” she said. “I’ll put it that way.”

She added, “As a woman, I had to really set the tone and remind him, ‘It wasn’t a man that did this to you. It was a woman.’”

He kept resisting, allowing her to further impart a particular lesson.

“You did that to a woman, and a woman got back and did this to you.” she said. “So it had him contemplating, ‘Maybe I won’t mess with the next woman.’ Because you never know. There’s nice ones and there's ones that will really defend themselves and go all out.”

The man protested.

“He said, ‘Let me explain!’ I’m like, ‘There’s nothing to explain. You’re a rapist,’” she recalled. “He said, ‘I don’t care.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean you don’t care? You’re a rapist.’ He said, ‘I don't care.’”

Before and after the flood

Queens Eagle 

A rainy night means a sleepless night for residents of one section of East Elmhurst. They’d prefer to catch the disaster as it strikes, rather than wake up to it in the morning.

For years, residents of 77th Street and of nearby blocks in East Elmhurst say they’ve struggled with sewer water flooding their basements and apartments, causing them anxiety, health issues and thousands of dollars in damages. Most of the flooding comes after just an average rain, they say.

As climate change brings heavier and more frequent rainfall, locals are looking for solutions, which may not be as straightforward – or as immediate – as they might hope.

“On our block, sewer backup is what impacts all of us,” said Nabil Jamaleddine, an East Elmhurst local and software engineer who has lived in the area since 2017.

Pretty much whenever it rains, locals on 77th Street and surrounding blocks in the neighborhood, stress about sewer surges, which occur when the sewer system and catch basins can’t keep up with the demand brought on by the falling rain.

Heavy rain or a dangerous storm is bad, but just a little bit of rain, Jamaleddine says, can create an immense problem.

“Any amount of sewage in the basement, over a few inches, or even half an inch, is just terrible to deal with,” he said.

The flooding often leads to mold, which becomes a problem in itself. Cleaning the damage caused by the flooding creates more worries due to toxins in the sewer water that find their way into East Elmhurst basements.

Alvaro Cruz, another resident, got an infection in his legs several months after cleaning his basement after Hurricane Ida, which he attests to the dirty water.

“I was in the hospital three times,” he said.

The dangers of the water’s contents usually result in almost everything it touches, including important belongings and family heirlooms, needing to be thrown out.

Draining the basement is just half the battle – wallets are also drained.

“[I’m] just pouring money into this thing just to try to fix it,” said Jamaleddine. “But that thing gets very expensive. A lot of neighbors, they just don't have the funds to do this sort of thing.”

The problems first began to be noticed by residents after Hurricane Ida in 2021, which destroyed basements and flooded areas across the city, leaving 13 dead in the five boroughs, including 11 people from Queens.

The response to tha storm prompted a resurrected conversation on storm readiness, congressional hearings and even a visit from President Joe Biden, who stopped by a flooded block in East Elmhurst.

 

Citibikelash bash

 

 Queens Chronicle

A few weeks after an 18-slot Citi Bike station was installed at the corner of 97th Street and 23rd Avenue, some residents of East Elmhurst ended the summer with a rally to call for its removal.

Holding signs that read “Ban Citi Bike,” the East Elmhurst Corona Alliance along with community residents banded together last month to protest against the bike share company’s placement of docking stations in roadbeds on residential streets.

The group also started a Change.org petition, which was sent to David Risher, CEO of Lyft — which owns the service. The petition had garnered 323 signatures at the time of publication.

Frank Taylor, an East Elmhurst resident, community activist and chairman of Community Board 3, argues that the bike racks should be placed in commercial areas as opposed to residential, and that parking spaces are being taken away from residents.

“You can put them where people are actually going to use them, such as outside schools, shelters, hotels, parks — even over by Citi Field, where there’s a lack of bikes — but not outside of people’s property,” Taylor said. “Parking spots are valuable, especially in the East Elmhurst community, because we have a lot of seniors here who are not riding bikes.”

He also said the placement of the docking stations was in poor taste, due to their proximity to the East Elmhurst homes of late civil rights leader Malcolm X and the late former Queens Borough President Helen Marshall.

Giovanna Reid, district manager of CB 3, said that the Department of Transportation approached the board for feedback on the placement of the docking stations in East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights and North Corona, but did not adhere to its recommendation to avoid installing them on residential blocks.

“Your average biker is not going to come to these locations. They are strictly residential, and there’s no real bike path to these homes,” Reid said. “I think they could have better planned for this. They should revisit their placement of these bicycles.”

The DOT says it has received minimal negative feedback during the outreach and installation process of Citi Bikes. The agency recognizes that station siting does impact parking but said it uses sidewalks and street spaces left open at corners for “daylighting” — improving drivers’ line of sight — where feasible.

The agency strives to maintain a network density of 28 bike stations per square mile, to ensure that riders do not have to walk more than a few minutes to get to the closest station.

Mona Bruno, a spokesperson for the DOT, added that Citi Bike has become a wildly popular transportation option in New York City in recent years, and that ridership has soared since the pandemic.

“We’re excited to continue expanding service in Queens to help offer residents a sustainable and efficient way to get around — and we always try to best balance the various uses and needs of our streets and sidewalks,” Bruno said.

Jon Orcutt, advocacy director at Bike New York, a nonprofit that promotes and encourages bicycling and bicycle safety, said that Citi Bike is one of the best-used bike-share systems in the world, but that it could be improved in certain ways to make sustainable transportation easier for New Yorkers in transit deserts.

“I think the city could better link small mobility elements, like bikes, to the transit system. For example, if you don’t live right on Roosevelt Avenue, the 7 train might be a long walk, but it might only be a 10 minute bike ride or less,” Orcutt said. “There’s a lot of strategies you can put together to make it easy for people to get around without cars in a city like New York. While we are the transit capital of the United States, we don’t do some basic things that other places with really good, sustainable transportation systems do, and one of them is linking bikes and transit very explicitly.”

Queens is burning again. It's a lithium ion battery again.

 

Eyewitness News 

 One person was killed and several others were injured in a house fire that broke out in Queens.

Officials say the heavy flames tore through the home on 89th Street in East Elmhurst at around 11 p.m. Friday.

As firefighters worked to put out the blaze, they found a man in his 60s unconscious on the second floor. He was taken to a local hospital where he was pronounced dead.

Some of the other residents were taken to the hospital to be treated for minor injuries.

Residents say an e-scooter could be to blame for the fire.

"I unplugged the scooter, I was on the first floor. As I'm putting cereal in a bowl, I heard an explosion, like gunfire. As I open the door to the second floor, those stairs were already on fire in seconds. It was a disaster," Jose Corona said.

Firefighters did pull a burnt scooter from the residence, but the official cause of the blaze is still under investigation.

3-year-old boy beaten to death at Pan American Hotel homeless shelter

 

 Queens Post

A toddler is dead after being found battered and bruised inside a homeless shelter in Elmhurst Sunday — and police are investigating the incident as a homicide.

The victim, a 3-year-old boy named Shaquan Butler, was found at around 7:40 p.m. by police inside the Boulevard Family Residence — a family homeless shelter located at 79-00 Queens Boulevard. The child’s parents called 911, police said.

Butler was unconscious and unresponsive with bruises throughout his body that were in different stages of healing, according to the NYPD.

The child had a faint pulse when emergency services arrived on the scene and he was then transported by EMS to NYC Health & Hospital/Elmhurst but could not be saved, police said.

The toddler was also found to have had a collapsed lung, police said.

The victim’s mother told police that the child began to act strangely and began choking shortly before they called 911, the NYPD said.

He then ran into a pillar inside the shelter, fell back and struck his head on the floor, the boy’s mother told police.

 However, police say that story was inconsistent with his injuries and the NYPD has now launched a homicide investigation.

 

Not ironic at all

NY Daily News  

Hiram Monserrate, an ex-con and perennial New York politician expelled from the state Senate for assaulting his girlfriend, is gearing up to launch a campaign for a Queens Assembly seat this year, he confirmed to the Daily News on Wednesday.

Monserrate, who was previously close with Mayor Adams, said he’s in the midst of collecting signatures to mount a Democratic primary challenge against Assemblyman Jeffrion Aubry.

Aubry, whose district includes East Elmhurst, needs to be unseated because of his continued support for the state Legislature’s 2020 bail reforms, said Monserrate.

“Out of the many reasons there are to challenge the current incumbent, the most important is his stubborn stance in refusing to repeal and amend the current bail reform laws,” Monserrate said.

Monserrate’s distaste for the bail reforms is shared by Adams, who has tied them to an uptick in crime during the pandemic and urged state legislators earlier this year to rescind them.

However, most Democratic lawmakers in Albany have countered that the reforms — which limited the use of cash bail for nonviolent crimes — are unrelated to recent crime spikes, sparking tension between Adams and the Legislature.

Aubry, who has represented his district since 1992, said Monserrate appears to be trying to hitch his campaign wagon to “the issue of the moment” by zeroing in on bail reform.

“You will remember that the mayor and Mr. Monserrate were in the Police Department together and in the Senate together,” Aubry said. “I don’t know whether he’s mimicking the mayor, and I support the mayor, but every time something happens in the city, he says it’s bail reform that’s at fault even though bail reform had nothing to do with it.”

A spokesman for Adams did not return a request for comment.

East Elmhurst mixed-use building left for dead

 

 

Walk on the wild side in the world's borough

President Biden doesn't know who the representative of East Elmhurst is

President Joe Biden came to Queens and he did not know who East Elmhurst's congressperson was.

When he realized it was @AOC he thanked her for representing the alley.

The other officials there didn't know it was her alley, er district either

Farcical pic.twitter.com/gk2M8SadM7

— This is JQ LLC (@ImpunityCity) September 7, 2021

Shootings in Queens since the ball drop

East Elmhurst

Long Island City

Kew Gardens

New Year's Eve honorable mention in Jamaica

Rents go up at COVID-19's epicenter neighborhoods

THE CITY

In some parts of the city, rents have dropped since the COVID-19 crisis began. But for neighborhoods that felt the effects of the coronavirus most, listed prices have risen slightly, according to a new analysis.

The annual rental report by the apartment-listings site StreetEasy paints a very different price picture between the neighborhoods with the lowest coronavirus infection rates — primarily wealthier neighborhoods in Manhattan and Brooklyn — and the hardest-hit areas, mostly in Queens and The Bronx.

Between February and July of this year, rents fell by 1.9% in the zip codes with the lowest COVID-19 rates in the city, like Battery Park City, Greenwich Village and Tribeca, according to the report, comprised of market-rate listing data.

However, in the neighborhoods with the highest rates of COVID-19, per city health department data — East Elmhurst, Corona and Jackson Heights topped the list — advertised rents have climbed a bit in the same time period, rising 0.3%.

 The findings contradict the claim that there’s an “exodus out of the city,” said Nancy Wu, an economist at StreetEasy.

“That’s specific to Manhattan, and a lot of these Manhattan-esque neighborhoods,” she said. Elsewhere in the city, “it’s a very different picture.”

"Baby box bill" and DHS fail to protect twins at homeless hotel

From Fox News:

New York City police have reported the tragic deaths of twin two-month-old babies at a shelter for homeless families that was once a LaGuardia Airport motel.

The father woke up from a three-hour afternoon nap and found the infants not breathing in separate cribs, WNBC-TV reported.

The cribs were filled with pillows, the station reported.

Doctors were unable to save them at the hospital, the station reported.

In 2017, Gov. Cuomo signed the "baby box bill." From The National Herald:

The baby boxes, which are designed for infants six months old or younger, will be distributed in areas of the state with the greatest infant mortality rates. They are designed according to the safe infant sleep guidelines of the Academy of Pediatrics and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and discourage high-risk behaviors on the part of parents that are associated with Sudden Unexpected Infant Death (SUID). Each baby box has a firm mattress with a fitted sheet which are two key elements for safe sleep.

Parents will also be given educational information on the dangers of co-sleeping and the risks when blankets, pillows, stuffed animals, and loose bedding are used. Many parents of newborns have no idea that these seemingly innocent items in a crib can put a sleeping baby at risk.

So... did DHS not get the memo about the bill? Did the state not supply them? What the f*ck happened here and why is it that it seems no one will be held accountable?

Two month old twins die in hotel homeless shelter

NY Daily News

Authorities are investigating the deaths of 2-month old twins who were staying with their family in a city homeless shelter, police said Friday.

Emergency responders found the twins, a boy and a girl, unconscious around 3 p.m. inside the lobby of the Landing, a Queens hotel that doubles as a city-funded family shelter.

Medics rushed them to Elmhurst Hospital Center where they were pronounced dead.

The babies’ father told cops he put the children down for a nap earlier in the day, but found them lifeless when he went to check on them.

Twin infants died Friday afternoon after they fell unconscious at a Queens homeless shelter, police said.

Cops were questioning the father Friday. No charges have been filed.

“This is a heartbreaking tragedy. We offer our condolences to the family and will provide them with any and all support that we can during this difficult time," said Isaac McGinn, a spokesman for the city Department of Social Services, which is responsible for the shelter system.

Friend of family burns down their house after they ask him to leave

 NY Post

 A man who was taken in by a Queens family when he needed a place to stay returned the kindness with unspeakable horror — setting the home ablaze in a gasoline-fueled inferno that not only killed him but also two of his host’s family members, including a 6-year-old girl, police sources and family said Thursday.

David Abreu Nuñez, 27, went off the rails inside the Moreno family’s two-story Elmhurst home on 93rd Street Wednesday afternoon, sparking the top-floor blaze after he was asked to pack up and go.

“We were helping someone and they were asked to leave because we found out certain things about that person and he just lost it,” said homeowner Raul Moreno, referring to Nuñez. “And this is the price we pay for helping somebody.”

Moreno said that Nuñez was a friend of a family member and had been staying at the home since Monday.

“He had no place to go. He was kicked out of his room or his apartment or something like that,” Moreno said. “He had no place to go, so we were like, ‘Stay here for a couple of days, we’ll help you find a place.’”

Moreno added: “Then we found out his past and we just asked him to leave because we had kids in the house.”

Nuñez had “mental issues,” Moreno said, claiming, “He would fabricate a lot of lies … things just didn’t add up. It made us very suspicious.”

“We just asked him to leave in a nice manner. We didn’t force anybody. I just asked him, ‘It’s time for you to leave’ and he just lost it.”

After the blaze, the FDNY found a five-gallon gas can on the floor where the fire started, sources said.

The two-alarm fire left Nuñez, Emma Dominguez, 6, and her 76-year-old grandfather, Claudio Rodriguez, dead, police sources said.

Emma’s mom, 35-year-old Elizabeth Rodriguez, and Emma’s 10-month-old brother, Liam Dominguez-Rodrigo, were critically injured, the sources said.

Variance granted for property that city messed up

From the Queens Chronicle:

Community Board 3 last Thursday overwhelmingly voted in support of a variance that would allow for a two-story home to be built at 31-41 97th St. The lot, not far from the Louis Armstrong Middle School, has been vacant since the city tore down a home at the location in 1976.

“We feel that this resolves a hardship in a unique situation, fills a lot that has been vacant for 40 years and fits with the character of the neighborhood,” said architect Arthur Yellin, who is working with the owner, Luisa Beneby, to develop the property.

Yellin said the situation is a result of the city’s decision years ago to subdivide the lot after it condemned and demolished the dilapidated structure that previously existed there. Officials sold the parcels separately and Beneby bought one of the lots in 1978.

Developing the 20-foot-wide lot has proven to be a challenge, according to Yellin. A variance is needed because the property doesn’t have enough space to include a side yard. It is also not feasible to have a driveway or garage with two parking spaces side-by-side.

“It cannot be developed in any way without a variance,” Yellin said.

Beneby has filed plans with the Buildings Department to construct a two-story, twofamily home. It would include a garage underneath the building with vehicles parked in tandem, one in front of the other. The sides of the home would be on the lot lines.

One of the conditions for the variance is that the hardship for which relief is being sought wasn’t created by the owner. The proposed home is also required to fit within the context of the neighborhood. Yellin said both requirements were satisfied.

“The situation was actually created by the city itself. The city took a legal lot and subdivided it, making it an illegal lot,” said Yellin, adding that the proposed home is “very contextual.”

A glimpse of Queens in the 1960s

You can't help but wonder... WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED?

Oh yeah, tweeding happened.

AirTrain will chip away more land from FMCP

From NBC:

Residents in northern Queens are crying foul over a plan to create an AirTrain to LaGuardia Airport. Roseanne Colletti reports.

Tire thieves out in force

From CBS 2:

Several vehicles have been stripped of their wheels in Queens, and the cars all have something in common, police say.

Police say at least 16 cases of stolen tires and rims have been reported in neighborhoods like Astoria, Jackson Heights and East Elmhurst since February.

AAA’s Robert Sinclair told Castro this isn’t surprising. He said the fact thieves are targeting newer Honda Accords, Acura MDXs and Toyota Camrys can be attributed to how popular the cars are on the showroom floor.

Police sources told CBS2 the suspects are likely part of an organized crime ring that works in teams. Suspects in a scout car will pick out a target, then a van is called in with the tools to do the job.

A car can be stripped in a matter of minutes. The parts are then resold. Things like wheel locks do help, but they aren’t always foolproof.

Feds hunting down lone LaGuardia coyote

From PIX11:

A parking lot for LaGuardia employees was cleared out Wednesday while U.S. Dept. of Agriculture officials hunted for a coyote. This is according to several people who work for the company that runs the parking lot.

PIX11 has been covering the controversy over coyotes living near LaGuardia Airport for the last several years.

In 2016, a family of coyotes was caught and euthanized by government officials who said it was a necessary measure to protect the public. One coyote survived. Today, they were looking for that lone coyote.

The lot is located at the end of Berrian Boulevard. The crux of the argument - wildlife officials say the coyotes pose a danger to people but others say leave the coyote alone.