Hell on wheels on Rockaway Blvd.

 

Queens Chronicle

Police were mocked and their vehicles vandalized during another raucous illicit car meet in Ozone Park late Saturday into early Sunday morning. Cops are seeking multiple individuals wanted for reckless endangerment and criminal mischief in the matter.

The incident occurred within the confines of the 102nd Precinct, in the vicinity of Rockaway Boulevard and 97th Avenue, at around 12:50 a.m., police said.

A group of individuals recklessly operated multiple cars and vandalized three NYPD vehicles. Authorities said the suspects dented the sides of the police cars and broke multiple vehicle windows using traffic cones. The group fled the location in various directions in multiple vehicles. No injuries were reported. Several people have been charged.

Footage posted to the social media platform Instagram by someone at the meet shows the delinquents surrounding both marked and unmarked police vehicles, jeering and making vulgar gestures at the officers seated inside before throwing a traffic cone on top of one marked vehicle’s windshield. The cops seated inside stare straight ahead, unmoving.

The car meet situation is not unfamiliar for those living in the area, as that location, near Cherry Valley Marketplace, at 84-12 97th Ave., has seen its share of rogue gatherings over the years. The issue recurs every few months, residents say, with large groups gathering to do doughnuts, race and perform other dangerous activities in their vehicles.

But the attack on police is a new factor.

Videos from the incident, centered on Rockaway and 84th Street, were posted to neighborhood Facebook pages and received hundreds of comments, with the majority of respondents outraged at the exhibited behavior.

The Ozone Park Residents Block Association on Monday sent a letter to Mayor Adams, the city Department of Transportation and area elected officials about the matter.

“This past Saturday, March 29, 2025, from approximately 10:00 PM until 1:30 AM on Sunday, a large group of individuals unlawfully took over Rockaway Boulevard between 83rd and 84th Streets. This has been a worsening trend over the past five years, with each incident growing in scale and audacity,” the letter read. “We commend the officers of the 102nd Precinct for their diligent efforts in curbing these meets in private lots and parks. However, now that the problem has moved into our streets, they require reinforcements and a coordinated response plan.”

The block association called on city leadership to “take decisive action before this issue spirals further out of control.”

The Cityline Ozone Park Civilian Patrol in a statement thanked the NYPD’s 102nd Precinct for its quick response.

“After the last major incident at this intersection, we wrote to the NYC Department of Transportation calling for permanent traffic-calming infrastructure — including flex-post delineators,” the group wrote. “We renew that call today. This can’t keep happening. And it’s going to take more than just enforcement to stop it.”

The cops call it criminal mischief in Ozone Park too

 

 

 QNS

Sam Esposito, the former president of the Ozone Park Residents Block Association, has been arrested for allegedly ripping off out-of-state license plates from multiple cars, according to authorities.

Police from the 102nd Precinct arrested Esposito on Saturday, July 20, following a reported incident earlier in the week on Sunday, July 14, New York Court records show. 

The complainant, Prakash Raghunauth, is one of the owners of the family-owned auto repair shop Ramesh and Son, located at 86-09 101st Ave. in Ozone Park. The repair shop has been criticized for having cars parked on the street outside, taking up parking spaces.

Raghunath said he reported the incident to the police after obtaining video footage from two nearby businesses of Esposito stealing the plates. The video appears to show Esposito ripping off license plates from the front of his shop and in front of a nearby gas station on Rockaway Boulevard this month.

Video footage obtained by QNS from the auto shop owner shows what appears to be Esposito in a silver van pulling up to cars parked near the shop and ripping off their license plates on multiple occasions.

Esposito has a long history of trying to get parked vehicles that are in derelict condition or unregistered off the streets of Ozone Park. He has been outspoken on the issue at both civic group meetings and on social media. 

The OZPK civic leader, who admitted to QNS that he ripped off the plates, said he was only doing his civic duty and will continue to have cars towed from the area, regardless of any setbacks. He took the plates since vehicles without them are more likely to be towed.

Overall, he said he is not worried about the situation. 

“People aren’t going to bully me to stop doing the work that I do,” Esposito said, adding earlier that thousands of illegal, derelict and unregistered cars are in Ozone Park alone.

 

Happy 248 USA

 

 

 The Sutter Ave. Of Americas. Have a great holiday and be careful with those fireworks.

 

Frank Lloyd Crap 101

  Welcome to our newest neighbors on 101st ave.

 

This attempt at brutalism architecture is in Ozone Park on 92nd St. and it's also on the NYC Housing connect program.

 

              

I really don't know what these amenities are supposed to be. They appear to be patio lounge areas. 

   

 

The developer must have really liked the sliding door theme, the cages in front of them kind of looks like an afterthought. 

The commercial spaces would be hard to see, which makes these perfect for unlicensed and unregistered weed and ebike shops.

50 blocks away in South Jamaica, we have this stylish mixed used behemoth. It even has the checkerboard/Purina cat food design aesthetic.This previously was a building materials shop that got destroyed in a massive fire a few years ago. Still unsolved but I bet it involved a lithium ion battery being charged.

 

 

The building is more garage than residential. 

This mammoth mixed use cube annexed whatever space and natural light the next house once had.

No matter how much they deny it, the city of yes was always with us. 

A pedestrian river runs through Conduit

It took the Department Of Transportation Alternatives long enough to do this. Ozone Park residents had to risk their lives and a woman got killed trying to cross this landscape to the Linden Center Mall which opened over a half decade ago. But lets be honest here, this was primarily built so "deliveristas" can cut across on their ebikes and unlicensed motorcycles to make deliveries from Taco Bell.

Teenage girl sexually harrassed and assaulted twice walking by Ozone Park homeless shelter

 

 

Wednesday, August 16, 2023

1:00 PM

Laurel Hall Shelter

85-15 101 Ave

Ozone Park NY 11416

Provider-Lantern

Agency-DHS

Owner-Asher Shafran/Seyfarth Shaw LLP

Do we wait for someone to get raped before anyone will listen to us?

On July 18, 2023, a 17-year-old girl, a minor, was sexually harassed and terrified by clients of DHS/Lantern living in the Laurel Hall Shelter. We approached Lantern and asked for a meeting to resolve this situation. A meeting was set for Tuesday, August 8, 2023, with Senator Addabbo, Community Board # 9 District Manager James McClelland, the NYPD 102 Pct Captain Kivlin with community affairs, and the parent of the 17-year-old and Lantern. Ironically, the night before the meeting, August 7, 2023, the same girl was sexually harassed; this time, a police report was filed with the 102 PCT. When we arrived Tuesday, Lantern refused to meet with us after knowing that this meeting was set up for almost ten days, slamming the door in our faces and refusing to even talk to the Senator. Their excuse was DHS told them not to meet with us. UNACCEPTABLE AND UNPROFESSIONAL. Total disregard for our Ozone Park community.

 

We are holding a press conference with the parent of the 17-year-old girl to put a face to the problem and show this administration that these are real people being affected by mismanaged providers who have no regard for our community. We have had a very cordial relationship with the past management of Lantern, but the new administration has proven to be ineffective in working with our community and keeping our residents safe. If this is a sign of things to come, ALL communities must be vigilant and aware of what is happening or what could happen. This could have easily turned into another rape, but the girl lives next to the shelter and was able to free herself and get home both times.

 

A reminder that on October 2019, a 3-year-old was sexually molested by a resident of this very same shelter. DHS, under Steve Banks's and Mayor Deblasio's leadership, did nothing, nor did they try to help resolve this. At the time, an arrest was made with no help from DHS or Lantern. Warrants had to be issued as DHS refused to aid in the arrest.

We now demand Mayor Eric Adams look at everyone who was rolled over from the Banks/Deblasio days and either gets reassigned or fired. We are not going to wait for a repeat of molestation again. We are informing the city that the next time we will file a class action lawsuit holding the city, Dhs, Lantern, and the property owners responsible for all criminal activity from this shelter. You will NOT destroy our quality of life with your inability to control these clients. Many of them have untreated mental illness, and Lantern, DHS, nor NYC are doing anything to help.

 

We are also monitoring the sex apps to catch them using public areas to have sex. We have since closed 1 locations they got caught in and had them fenced up so they canot use them anymore. We also watch for the parks where they were trying to hook up there and have since turned that over to the NYPD.

DHS/Office of Intergovernmental Affairs was given seven days to set up the Community Advisory Board (CAB) Meeting, and here we are; nothing has been done. So we are now holding a press conference and allowing the mother of the minor 17-year-old to speak her voice and give a face to the sexual harassment and the inadequate way this shelter is being run. The mother has now advised us that she lives in fear and that she now wants to move.

The demands are as follows:

1-All personnel rolled over from the Banks/Deblasio administration need to be reassigned. They have proven to be inefficient, unconcerned and uncooperative.

2-We are asking for a review of Lantern's contract. What services are supposed to be provided, and what assistance are these clients supposed to have? We believe Lantern has cut corners and sacrificed our communities safety for profits.

 
3-Lantern needs to provide effective and caring leadership as the current leadership has failed our community as well as its mission statement of caring for the shelter clients while working with the community.

4- A review of how these clients are permitted to roam all over the neighborhood, stealing packages, drinking, causing havoc, and sitting on people's stoops with no programs provided by Lantern makes for more criminal activity.

5-We demand that we return to the days of the CAB meetings so that, as a community, we get to speak our voices, and they get to hear our concerns.

6-Security needs to be beefed up inside and outside this shelter. Loitering has become a huge problem surrounding this site, and security is doing nothing.

7-Lantern needs to respect our community, and we are tired of our voices not being heard.

8-We demand that the NYPD have access when necessary when a crime has been committed by a shelter client and not stonewalled by Lantern or DHS.

Sam Esposito

President

Ozone Park Residents Block Association-ozpkrba

Update: 

QNS

A furious and fed-up Ozone Park mother rallied with community leaders Wednesday, Aug. 16, outside a shelter for homeless men where her 17-year-old daughter was allegedly sexually harassed by residents twice in the last month.

Lissette Moreno joined members of the Ozone Park Residents Block Association outside the Laurel Hall Shelter at 85-15 101st Ave. and told them about the first incident that happened to her daughter on July 18, as the teenager was walking home late at night after her shift at Russo’s on the Bay in Howard Beach.

“It’s just not safe here. You have people here with mental illnesses that shouldn’t be here and if they are here, they should be on medication, they should be supervised,” Moreno said. “This shelter needs to go. It’s too dangerous for our kids,”

She said she lives on 86th Street directly next door to the shelter which is located across 101st Avenue from Crossover Baptist Church a block away from Ampere Playground. 

 “Who puts a shelter here where there are schools, where there are children? I have my daughter, she comes home from work at late hours, why does she have to be harassed by these guys?” Moreno asked. “I’m just so tired.”

She wanted her daughter to speak at the rally, but she stayed away out of fear of being targeted by the residents of the shelter. Moreno said the men are out in front of the building each night drinking and smoking and blasting loud music.

“This is a men’s shelter, so when they’re outside they want to interact with women,” Moreno said.

After her daughter was allegedly sexually molested by two men in front of the shelter on July 18, Moreno found her daughter trembling as the men were telling the teen to add their numbers to her phone. Two days later, one of the same men followed her daughter up the block. Her complaints have fallen on deaf ears and the people who run the shelter “have no compassion,” she said, adding her daughter wants to move out of the neighborhood and they are currently looking for a new place.

Rodents capture discount store

 

 QNS

Members of the Ozone Park Residents Block Association (OZPKRBA)  stood outside of the neighborhood’s Dollar Tree at 137-20 Cross Bay Blvd. on Monday, Aug. 7 to warn locals of “a rat infestation” that ultimately forced the store to close after numerous complaints.

This past weekend, OZPKRBA President Sam Esposito, a lifelong Ozone Park resident, received complaints from residents who notified him of the store’s condition. Esposito arrived at the store on Sunday afternoon to check it out for himself only to find rat droppings underneath and on top of some of the store’s food products, as well as packaging that appeared to have been eaten through by the rodents.

“What we saw was appalling,” Esposito told reporters on Monday. “It’s all over the store.”

For Esposito, his immediate concern rooted from the store’s close proximity to local shelters that house families that rely on Dollar Tree for affordable food. Upon seeing the extent of the store’s rat problem for himself, Esposito confronted the store’s assistant manager before contacting Dollar Tree’s corporate office and the neighborhood’s elected representatives.

“[She] dismissed us, disrespected us, would not take this seriously and would not remove the food from the shelves,” Esposito said of his conversation with the store’s assistant manager. “Corporate from Dollar Tree came onto the scene [and] shut down this site down, as of eight o’clock this morning, indefinitely.”

Dollar Tree first opened its doors on Cross Bay Boulevard in 2018 shortly after the closure of Lady Jane Craft Center, which previously occupied the space for decades. Since opening, Esposito said the store has been an ongoing source of problems, including garbage buildup in the streets, not cleaning the sidewalk, leaving gates unsecured and prostitutes “doing business” in the store’s garage.

This, according to Esposito, has earned the store a poor reputation over the past few years.

“We have three Dollar Trees,” Esposito said. “This one is known as the worst, the sloppiest, the dirtiest and now, rat-infested.”

 

Mixed crap use building arises on 101st Ave.

 

Who would have thought Ozone Park would be getting the same boxy pseudo condo shit you see in Williamsburg or Bushwick? But we do live in the City Of Yes now.

 

What's with those cages on the windows? Are those sliding doors? And what's going on with all that other space on the second floor? Is that supposed to be event space? 

This really gives Mayor Eric Adams recent tone-deaf statements on how tenants don't really need windows more resonance.

NYC Parks carpet bombed trees at Nicholas Demutis Park

A year after the de Blasio massacre of East River Park, NYC Parks is still killing trees for no reason. Even this modest little green space in Ozone Park, Queens, which is named after a cop who was killed on the job. Arborcide by "reimagining". 

Usually when the Parks Dept. does renovations they usually have a sign stating what they are doing, along with the names of the district's elected representatives on it. Not with this one though.

 

 

Queensway at Aqueduct?

 

 

Um, is the Aqueduct Station in Ozone Park being prepped for the Queensway linear park already?

The war on cars' war criminals

 

NY Post

The city turned a blind eye for years while a Queen’s tow company monopolized services on many Big Apple highways and ripped off thousands of drivers in the process, a bombshell new lawsuit alleges.

The class-action suit, filed Saturday in Manhattan Supreme Court, seeks more than $58 million in damages for the duped motorists from the NYPD, the city Department of Consumer and Worker Protection and Runway Towing Corp. It alleges city officials let the company run an illegal “racketeering enterprise” at the expense of unsuspecting motorists.

The suit also accuses the NYPD of repeatedly extending Runway’s contract since 2013 without competitive bidding and, in the process, ignoring many complaints the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection was getting about the company’s alleged lawbreaking, which included underpaying workers and illegally compensating them with cash off the books.

The two city agencies “conspired … to allow Runway to operate … even though at least six years ago motorists were telling them that Runway is overcharging consumers,” said lawyer Gary Rosen, who represents Runway customers and ex-staffers in the lawsuit.

The suit claims Runway has earned more than $200 million since 2010 off its NYPD contract to provide roadside assistance and towing services on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway; Kosciusko Bridge; the Cross Island Parkway in Queens; sections of the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn and Queens; Brooklyn’s Gowanus Expressway and Prospect Expressway; and the Staten Island Expressway, West Shore Expressway, Korean War Veterans Parkway and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Expressway on Staten Island.

It also alleges the company relies on shady practices to drive up its profits, including instructing tow operators to bring vehicles they pick up to the company’s office in Ozone Park — no matter where they break down.

It’s a move that generates hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of extra dollars in unnecessary towing and storage costs for the public per vehicle, former Runway workers and customers told The Post.

Mary Olsen, 62, said she had no choice but to give away her 2000 Nissan Altima to Runway after it was rear-ended and totaled on the Staten Island Expressway two years back. She said a Runway tow truck brought the car to the Ozone Park storage facility more than 20 miles away without her consent — and without providing a cheaper option, such as towing it to a parking space off the nearest exit or a nearby auto body shop.

 

Nabes not so high on weed shops

 

Queens Chronicle

Last Thursday, the Office of Cannabis Management announced that New York State had begun accepting applications for the first recreational cannabis dispensary licenses.

The first legal adult-use retail dispensaries will be run by those impacted by the prohibition of cannabis. Qualifying business applicants must have a conviction for a marijuana-related offense or have a parent, legal guardian, child, spouse or dependent with one in New York.

One Ozone Park man has already submitted one application and is working on a second, with hopes of eventually opening a dispensary in Queens.

“My business partner and I are both justice-involved and we both meet the criteria,” said Jeremy Rivera, a 38-year-old from Ozone Park.

“Kush Culture is me 51 percent, him 49 and then Gourmet Buds is him 51 percent me 49,” he told the Chronicle this week.

Rivera spent eight years in prison for nonviolent crimes, two of which were drug-related.

Now, he owns a construction-consulting company where he teaches OSHA and city buildings regulations and audits job sites for construction-safety compliance.

“I am and always have been ambitious. Even when I was in the streets and I was dealing drugs, I was very ambitious.”

His business experience helps him check off the box from the state that requires applicants have experience owning and operating a “qualifying” business that has been profitable for at least two years.

His business partner owns a deli in Lindenhurst, LI.

Although Rivera is a Queens guy through and through, he is not sure he will be able to open the dispensary here.

“I’m not getting really good responses from the communities in Queens,” he said.

“I’d love to open a dispensary here, but I don’t know. It seems like I’m getting a lot of conservative views on this.”

He specifically wanted to open up a shop in Ozone Park but was told by community leaders that it might not be “the right place.”

Ozone Park hotel is a homeless shelter again

 

 Queens Chronicle

Amidst the city scrambling to find space to house an influx of asylum seekers and increasing homeless in New York City, one former Ozone Park shelter has been reactivated to meet the demand.

“The need for space has a direct correlation to New York being a sanctuary city,” Councilwoman Joann Ariola (R-Ozone Park) told the Chronicle.

She learned last week from the community board that the Travelodge on Redding Street would be converted back into a shelter.

That location and the adjacent Ozone Inn & Suites were previously used to shelter homeless families but were phased out by the city in the fall of 2021. Now, the one location will be used to house up to 75 families. So far, approximately 60 families had already moved in.

On Monday, the Mayor’s Office announced an emergency procurement declaration that allows the city to contract quickly with shelters and service providers.

“Over the past two months, we have seen a significant increase in the number of asylum seekers arriving in our city’s shelter system,” Mayor Adams said in a statement.

“To fulfill our city’s legal and moral mandate to provide quality shelter to anyone experiencing homelessness, and to ensure we are providing appropriate services to asylum seekers, we are immediately issuing an emergency procurement declaration to rapidly procure additional shelter and services to serve these individuals and families.”

According to officials, approximately 4,000 asylum seekers have entered the city shelter system since late May, largely contributing to the 10 percent increase in the city Department of Homeless Services’ census.

More than 100 additional asylum seekers are seeking housing each day, the Mayor’s Office stated in a press release.

As of May, there were nearly 50,000 homeless people, including over 15,000 children, living in the city’s shelter system, according to the Coalition for the Homeless.

The city is in talks with the federal government to seek reimbursements for the emergency costs.

Ariola said there will be bi-weekly meetings at the Travelodge with her office, Community Board 10, the NYPD and the DHS.

“I’m concerned about how the families are being treated and I’m concerned about any type of negative impact that could have on the surrounding community,” said Ariola.

 

Ozone Park looks like Bedford Falls

The lots by the Aqueduct train station has finally come to use.

Huron St. rowhouses are actually in context. 

 

Last but not least, another McMansion similar to the monstrosity on the corner of the Hawtree St and the fork at Conduit Blvd and Albert Rd has materialized as well. 


 

Another woman murdered in her house in Queens

 

QNS

 

A woman was shot and killed inside an Ozone Park home on Wednesday afternoon.

Police from the 106th Precinct in Ozone Park answered a 911 call regarding the shooting at 94-59 109th Ave., one block east of Cross Bay Boulevard just before 2:30 p.m. on May 4. Upon their arrival, officers discovered the woman inside the two-story brick home unconscious and unresponsive with a single gunshot wound to her head, an NYPD spokesman said.

 The NYPD released surveillance images of the man who was wearing a light-colored hooded jacket, a dark baseball cap, white pants and dark sneakers.

Update: Suspect turns himself in.

NY Post

The mother of an NYPD officer was fatally shot at her Queens home on Wednesday afternoon after answering her door – and her alleged killer surrendered to police about an hour later, authorities said.

Anna Torres, 51, was shot twice, including in the head, by a gunman who drew her to the door of her two-story single-family home at 94-59 109th Ave. in Ozone Park at about 2:30 p.m., cops said.

Torres was pronounced dead on scene. Two of her relatives were inside the home at the time of the fatal shooting, NYPD Deputy Chief Jerry O’Sullivan said at a Wednesday night press conference.

 The suspect in Torres’ death, Giuseppe Canzani, 41, fled the scene after the shooting in black Chevy Traverse.

Shortly before 3:30 p.m.,Canzani pulled up to the 106th Precinct in the same vehicle before exiting and placing a .45-caliber silver firearm on the sidewalk, O’Sullivan said.

City rules in favor for non-profit's homeless shelter in Ozone Park after long legal battle

 

City Land 

 A not-for-profit proposed to convert two buildings in Ozone Park into homeless services facilities. In July 2016, Common Ground Management Corporation, a not-for-profit organization, applied to the City of New York for approval of a homeless shelter and services project. The non-for-profit organization intended to convert two multistory adjacent buildings in Ozone Park into temporary housing for homeless adults that would provide medical and psychiatric services, meals, laundry, and showers for stays of up to nine months.

Neighbors in the area sued the City of New York to stop the development of the Ozone Park project. The neighbors claimed that the City had unlawfully segmented the environmental review. The neighbors reasoned that the Ozone Park project was part of the City’s 2017 City-wide plan to address homelessness and asserted that the City was required to conduct an environmental review of each project that was part of the 2017 plan.

Queens County Supreme Court Justice Howard G. Lane ruled against the neighbors, finding that the City had not segmented its environmental review. The court found that the City’s 2017 report was a “general agency policy” and the City had not yet identified specific locations to create the homeless shelters. Further, the facilities to be built as part of the City-wide plan would be sponsored by various organizations, built at different times and by different contractors, and would not be dependent on one another.

The NYC Luxury Public Housing Connection

 

Impunity City 

 With a month to go until the eviction moratorium expires on January 15th (Martin Luther King’s birthday, SMDFH), hundreds of thousands of city residents will either repay their debts to their landlords or probably get evicted from their apartment aka homes. As this crisis gets closer with each passing second and as the weather gets colder, the other and brighter side of life in New York Fucking City should not got unacknowledged…

Good news every tenant in New York City, THE RENT IS TOO DAMN HIGH AGAIN!. Truly a monumental event and a sign that the recovery for all of us that Mayor de Blasio has been repetitively been talking about is about to come to fruition, at least for those that count. Meaning those that are able to count what little savings they have. Because if the rents are going up again, surely this trend will trickle down to the perpetually housing insecure via the city’s Housing New York program to build and preserve affordable housing for the city’s desperate and downtrodden who pay 1/3 of their check in rent right?

Of course not. As I pointed out last year of an apartment building in west Soho (which is called Hudson Square now to make it even nichier), The Blaz’s affordable housing program is a fucking ruse and a hoax. And now after 8 years of “affordable housing”development usually sprouting in establish gentrification colonizer Brooklyn nabes like Williamsburg, Bushwick and Greenpoint and even in Queens enclaves like Astoria, Rockaway, Long Island City and quasi/pseudo-Brooklyn nabe Ridgewood, this inequitable farce and impossible to win lottery city program has sprouted in the most unlikeliest of towns in Southside Queens, Ozone Park.

When the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced the debut and opened the lottery for this building this year in March, it was quite a surprised to see it still looked like this three months later.

 

 

Now why would the owners and management of this “affordable housing” building advertise it with an private agency contact when it’s on the city government’s Housing Connect website? And what’s more outlandishly egregious is why it’s being advertised as “Luxury” which is not only misleading but wholly antithetical to de Blasio’s and his housing and preservation department lackeys intent to bring housing equity to the long suffering housing insecure, homeless, rent burdened citizens and gentrification refugees of New York City?

But since this is so eye catching, lets take a look at what kind of luxury the developers are peddling here with this.

Nothing defines luxury than a balcony, even if there is barely room for two people to stand on.

 Now I’m not an architect, but placing these HVAC’s on the pavement really looks like a massive shit idea and makes me wonder what the developers were thinking when they gave this the o.k. or even if they were in the board room when this was designed. I also wonder if the LLC even visited this site or even this state or country as this was being built.

 

Dirty cop ripping off tenants and charging above market rate for basement apartment

 

 

NY Daily News

A duplicitous NYPD veteran is accused of scamming eight apartment hunters by posing as the owner of his rented Queens home, collecting a security deposit and first month’s rent from his victims before disappearing, the Daily News has learned.

Officer Burban Pierre advertised his rented basement apartment in Ozone Park via Craigslist over a four-month stretch in which prospective tenants paid up to $2,800 in move-in costs for the leased space that he called home, according to a victim and one of his neighbors.

Vivian Griffith answered the officer’s ad in April, recalling how she texted Pierre, signed a lease and paid $2,200 upfront for security and rent. But the frustrated woman was never able to move inside, and neighbors eventually alerted her to the officer’s ongoing swindle.

“I knocked on the people’s door upstairs,” she recalled. “They answered and said, ‘Pierre is the tenant living downstairs.’ I showed them the lease. They said, ‘Oh, he’s good. You’re the eighth one. We’ve had eight people come here on this.’ He never told me he was a cop.”

But Pierre, who earned nearly $130,000 on the job last year, definitely told her the building belonged to him, Griffith added.

“I feel very upset with the fact that this comes from an officer who is supposed to protect and serve,” added the mother of two daughters. “It’s shocking that a police officer would go to such lengths to take from people who don’t have. It’s disheartening and upsetting.”

The NYPD confirmed an investigation targeting Pierre, who joined the department in 2010 and was recently moved to the Bronx Court section after working in a pair of Manhattan precincts.

Recidvist criminal who killed beloved Ozone Park woman with a luxury car is caught and convicted

Queens Chronicle 

After a nine-month investigation, the suspected driver who allegedly fled the scene after killing Indo-Caribbean vocalist and Ozone Park resident Ritawantee “Rita” Persaud in a hit-and-run that shook the Queens Hindu community has been charged.

Police announced that they had arrested 23-year-old Cypress Hills resident Jason Liriano, a reputed gang member with a long list of prior charges on his record, last Thursday in connection with the incident.

On Sunday, Assembymember Jenifer Rajkumar (D-Woodhaven) organized a press conference with District Attorney Melinda Katz and various other civic and religious leaders to honor Persaud and publicize the news of the case, which had drawn rallies from advocates demanding the NYPD’s attention last winter.

“Thank you to the police for being an ally of the Indo-American community for working with us, protecting us, informing us. I am grateful for the strong relationship the NYPD has with our South Asian and Indo-Caribbean community,” Rajkumar said.

That same day, members of Persaud’s family and religious community held a separate vigil in Richmond Hill. When several members of her Hindu temple, Shanti Bhavan Mandir, arrived at the press conference, they raised some outstanding questions they had about the case that had not been answered publicly yet.

“I feel there should be more said about who the other occupants of that vehicle were,” said a woman who identified herself as a member of Persaud’s religious community. “I don’t think we know the full story.”

Persaud, 54, was taking an Uber ride in a black Toyota Camry last Christmas Eve when her vehicle was hit by a man with a passenger driving a Lamborghini SUV at Rockaway Boulevard and 103rd Avenue at approximately 7:05 p.m.

The Lamborghini driver fled the scene on foot.

Though his passenger remained at the crash site, and the NYPD later confirmed it was able to track down surveillance footage of the scene in December, the police were not able to make an immediate arrest under persistent pressure from elected officials, religious leaders and Indo-Caribbean advocates.

 

 

Rest in peace, Remi

From NBC:

A 9-year-old boy has died following a building fire in Queens early Wednesday.

The flames broke out around 2 a.m. in a three-story building on 102nd Road near Liberty Avenue in Ozone Park. Ten other people were rescued from the structure with minor injuries and the young boy was the only fatality, the FDNY said.

The boy has been identified as Remi Miguel Gomez Hernandez, police said.

It's unclear how the fire started but officials say it possibly began in the building's basement.

When you see something like this after a fire, it means the FDNY found something disturbing:

I'm sure BdB will do something about this as soon as he gets off the Times Square Ferris Wheel.