Results tagged “councilmanjamesdavis”

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is seeking the dismissal of a civil suit against her filed by Council Member Charles Barron's former chief of staff Viola Plummer. Quinn gave Plummer the boot when the councilman's aide refused to sign a pledge to compose herself while the City Council was in session.

• Today on the Gothamist Newsmap: a shooting on Elliot Ave. in Queens, a pedestrian struck on West 86th St. and Amsterdam Ave. in Manhattan, and a stabbing on Cozine Ave. in Brooklyn.
• The brother of murdered Councilman James Davis decried the threats of assassination against another councilman from Charles Barron's chief of staff.
• A man robbed a sunbathing woman in Central Park of her iPod and wallet, then also demanded a kiss before departing.
• The Times looks at a New York multi-millionaire who's shelling out a lot of cash for stimulating dinner conversation.
• After leaving office Mayor Bloomberg will 1) Attend his successor's inauguration 2) Go visit his Mom 3) Play a week's worth of golf.
• Council Speaker Christine Quinn wants to limit the amount of money individuals and organizations doing business with the city can give to politicians.
• Summer is officially upon us as New York experiences its first power outage of the season.
• New York magazine has a piece on where New York's top chefs shop for their food.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn struck Sonny Carson's name from a list of of New Yorkers to be honored with a street named after them because she thought the political activist was too divisive a figure. Carson was a proponent of black economic empowerment and was distemperate in his views of other New York groups (e.g., whites, Jews, Koreans). Councilman Charles Barron, who shares Carson's past as a radical activist, thought Carson's exclusion from the list was more divisive than anything Carson had ever done, and indeed, voting on an amendment Wednesday to re-add his name split almost entirely down racial lines and the session was extremely acrimonious.

The NY Times City section has a long feature about Law & Order's dramatization of the Adrienne Shelly murder. It was inevitable that the police procedural warhorse would cover one of the more bizarre and tragic murders in recent memory, and a casting notice for someone to play the illegal immigrant laborer who assaults an woman after she complains about construction noise confirmed that L&O would be tackling the story.

CBS 2 showed a video of City Councilman James Davis and his killer, Othniel Askew, right before the July 23, 2003 shooting, and it's really spooky. Here's CBS's description of what happens:

The tape shows Davis and assassin Othniel Askew enter the council chambers. Davis joins a group of other members during a presentation as Askew stands along the wall. The tape also shows just how close Askew was standing to plainclothes police officer Richard Burt, who moments later would shoot and kill him.

Continue reading "City Hall Shooter and Victim on Tape"

As an aide tells Newsday, "Security is a joke. It's a well-known fact among City Council workers. I'd hate to say it, but it wouldn't be the hardest thing to get a gun in there . . . Frankly, they put one cop at each metal detector and they have a lot of people going through, and it wouldn't be very hard for somebody to just walk by it."