Results tagged “funeral”

As the Internal Affairs investigation on Officer Andrew Kelly and the potential police coverup of his DWI crash continues, yesterday the accident's victim, Vionique Valnord, was laid to rest inside her preacher father's Brooklyn church. Hundreds of friends and family gathered at the Church of God in Marine Park to pay their final respects. Her brother-in-law said, "We don't know how to feel. Sad, mad, but we are happy that we are able to send Veronica to the Lord. We will see her again one day."

Please do heed the word "gruesome" before deciding whether to read further. Seriously. Police sources have told the Post that the body of slain Yale graduate student Annie Le was horrifically broken and mangled in order to fit through a wall opening the size of a computer screen. The corpse was found in a utility space in a bathroom wall near the basement lab where Le had been working the day she vanished.

Relatives, friends, teachers, and students gathered last night to mourn the tragic death of Glen Wright, who was stabbed to death outside his grandmother's East Village building because gang members mistook him for someone else. (We noted this devastating story yesterday, and like many, we're still profoundly saddened.) Wright, who died at age 21, was taking a break from helping his grandmother wash windows at the Baruch Houses on the Lower East Side when a group of men approached him. Suspect Joel Herrera, 20, is accused of stabbing Wright repeatedly in the neck; he told detectives he confused Wright with someone who assaulted one of his friends. Cops are searching for the other assailants.

       

Yesterday, music legend Michael Jackson was buried at Forest-Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California, ten weeks after his death. While the attendees were limited to two hundred family members and friends (including ex-wife Lisa Marie Presley, Corey Feldman, Macaulay Culkin, Barry Bonds, and Chris Tucker), the Reverend Al Sharpton kept his Twitter followers appraised of the services, Tweeting, "I am sitting at the burial services of michael jackson. I am talking to actress lisaraye mc coy who was at NAN when MJ came and tom mesereau," "What MJ went through was so unfair, yet he succeeded. In the end, he was the biggest artist ever. He faced the headwinds but he made it," "I just spoke at the conclusion of tributes. Gladys knight sang her heart out. Now we prepare to lay him top rest," and "MICHAEL JACKSON HAS BEENb LAID TO REST." Sharpton has defended Jackson's reputation and was at the Brooklyn MJ celebration last weekend.

What's worse: flirting with someone at your longtime love's funeral, or flirting with your own daughter? What about both! 68-year-old Ryan O'Neal admitted the creepy encounter in an interview with Vanity Fair, recounting the story as such: "I had just put the casket in the hearse and was watching it drive away, when a beautiful blond woman comes up and embraces me. I said to her, 'You have a drink on you? You have a car?' She said, 'Daddy, it's me—Tatum!' I was just trying to be funny with a strange Swedish woman, and it's my daughter. It's so sick." At least one of them recognized the other—maybe this means Tatum is sober now. The actress, who was busted for buying crack and cocaine on the LES last year, says, "That's our relationship in a nutshell. You make of it what you will. It had been a few years since we'd seen each other. And he was always a ladies' man, a bon vivant." No word on if the two have talked since. Estrangement means never having to say you're sorry?

A huge turnout, including hundreds of cops, is expected for the funeral of fallen Jersey City police officer Marc DiNardo. DiNardo, a father of three, was shot in the face over a week ago, when two shooting suspects fired upon the Emergency Service Unit cops staking out their apartment; four other police officers were wounded while the two suspects were killed. DiNardo's family, which decided to take the 37-year-old off life support on Tuesday and donate his organs, held a blood drive in his honor yesterday (which would have been his 38th birthday). The drive attracted hundreds—his widow Mary and mother were among the donors—and Jersey City Police Chief Thomas Comey said, "There's people here from every walk of life. It shows that people stand behind us." Today, a number of streets in Jersey City will be closed from 8 a.m. until the funeral procession passes through.

Yesterday, Danielle Edwards, widow of the off-duty cop Omar Edwards who was killed in a police "friendly fire" incident last week, was among the hundreds of mourners at the Woodward Funeral Home for her husband's wake. The Daily News said she sat in the third row with her two young sons, "the grief of lost love [was] etched on her face," and the NY Times noticed how "two drawings from his toddler son — jagged scribbles on plain white paper — were clipped together and placed on the satiny white interior of the casket, near a gold plaque that read 'Omar J. Edwards, 1984-2009.'" Leonid Timoshenko, whose police officer son Russel was killed during a 2007 traffic stop, paid his respects, telling the Post, "We're united in pain." Today is the second day of Omar Edwards' wake; tomorrow is the funeral at Our Lady of Victory Church on Throop Avenue in Brooklyn. He will be buried in East Farmingdale.

Every year the Improv Everywhere crew executes some prank to make fools of us all on this day, but the one they put together this year at Greenwood Cemetery serves as an example of an April Fools' Day joke done well (because so often these things go horribly wrong). They announce: "For our latest mission, 30 Improv Everywhere agents found a random funeral in the obituary section of the newspaper and turned it into the best funeral ever. We picked a man who had very few surviving relatives and then showed up to his funeral to make it truly awesome."

It was one week ago today that actress Natasha Richardson took her fatal spill on a ski slope in Canada, though originally feeling okay from the fall, she ultimately died of a blunt impact to the head last Wednesday after being transported to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

At the beginning of this week, actress Natasha Richardson was readying to take what turned out to be a fateful trip down the bunny hill at a ski resort in Canada. Now at week's end the Daily News reports that she's "embarked on her final journey." This morning, Richardson's body, in a wooden casket, was transported from Greenwich Village Funeral Home on Bleecker Street, to the American Irish Historical Society on 5th Avenue for a private wake held at 2 p.m. It's been rumored that she will be buried in Millbrook, NY, where the family had a home and Richardson belonged to the St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church. Prior to today's sad goodbye, the Tony award winner's husband, Liam Neeson, went to Broadway last night, where the lights were dimmed in tribute to his wife. The couple fell in love there while co-starring in "Anna Christie" in 1993. Though he came and left alone, reportedly Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, and actor Fisher Stevens were seen with him before he "walked by himself through an alley and drove away."

We knew it was coming, and this morning Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz held a mock funeral for the M train. Joining him were Daniel Squadron (New York State Senator), Michael Burke (Downtown Brooklyn Partnership), a bagpiper, and Paul Nelson (Assemblywoman Joan Millman's Chief of Staff).

Tomorrow morning the Straphangers Campaign and Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz will meet again, this time to hold a “mock funeral” for the M and R trains. They say, "Without new state aid, the MTA is proposing to eliminate parts of these subway lines, while also raising transit fares." They'll be grieving at the Court Street subway station in downtown Brooklyn mid-morning. When asked what was going on with the R, we were told: "NYC Transit is going to shutter 5 stations on the line between 11 pm and 6 am." Tomorrow's ceremony follows the farewell to the Z train—yet still, the W is getting nothing but disrespect!

Almost 300 mourners came out yesterday to celebrate the lives of the two brothers who perished in a Staten Island fire a week ago—one of whom was once named the High School Football Player of the Year by the Daily News. Seandale and Sha-Ron Gutter were placed side-by-side in their caskets during the service held at St. Philip's Baptist Church in Port Richmond. Their mother Lula Johnson-Gutter spoke at the service saying, "[God] knew if he left him behind, he would not survive and if he took Sha-Ron and left Seandale behind, he would not survived, because they were close that way. So he took them together and there they are together...These are my babies there and nobody knows how I feel. It's like I lost part of my life there." After there was initial speculation that the fire was suspicious, it's now believed to have been started by an electrical problem.

The Straphangers Campaign, Brooklyn Borough president Marty Markowitz and even bagpiper John Maynard came together today to mourn the passing of the Z train. A mock funeral was held at the Fulton Street-Broadway/Nassau subway station in Manhattan, and those in attendance tell us that there was also a "call on lawmakers and the MTA to save the Z line in its 2009 budget." So what does this mean, besides having to refer to the line as the JM now?

Loss of the Z would end "skip stop" service on the J line during rush hours between Jamaica, Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan, adding an hour extra each week in commuting for many riders, according to the Straphangers Campaign.

Two families mourned together in Ecuador yesterday, both having lost native sons to hate crimes that took place only a few dozen miles away from each other up here on the same island, but a hemisphere away from where they were born and are now buried. As hundreds gathered to pay their final respects to Jose Sucuzhañay, the man murdered in Bushwick last week, they were joined by relatives of Marcelo Lucero, who was murdered on Long Island last month. While teens have been arrested in Lucero's murder case, police are still searching for who was behind the attack on Sucuzhañay. His brother told the press, "I am thankful for the time that I had with my brother. This was a crime against all of us, it was a crime against humanity. May it never happen again."

In the wake of the fatal stabbing of B46 bus driver Edwin Thomas by a passenger earlier this month in Bedford-Stuyvesant, the MTA has announced a pilot program to test partitions that would separate drivers from passengers. The partitions will be tested on buses operating out of the Flatbush Depot in Brooklyn, the Times reports. A committee studying bus driver safety is also urging the MTA do away with the paper transfers issued on buses because it's a common cause of confrontation between drivers and passengers. Thomas was allegedly stabbed to death by 20-year-old Horace Moore after Thomas refused to hand out a paper transfer because he hadn't paid his fare. And the MTA also released a study showing that there were 236 assaults on bus drivers so far this year through December 9th, and 18 percent of those were related to fare evasion. (67 of the incidents involved the driver being spit on.)

Yesterday, bus drivers, MTA executives and friends joined the family of Edwin Thomas at his funeral. Thomas was killed last week while driving a B46 bus when an angry passenger stabbed him. The Transport Workers Union vowed to propose legislation for safer buses and NYC Transit president Howard Roberts said, "The legacy of Edwin Thomas will be a more secure and safe environment for bus drivers in this city."

The Staten Island Advance reports that "more than 5,000 firefighters lined" the street before the funeral for FDNY Lieutenant Robert Ryan. Ryan, who suffered serious burns while battling a 2006 fire but still returned to work, died on Sunday at age 46 while responding to a house fire on Staten Island. His wife Kathleen told the firefighters in attendance, "As much as you loved him, he loved you. The job was his life, and you guys were the reason he was a rich man." Mayor Bloomberg, who also spoke, referred to Thanksgiving, "There is something to give thanks for and that is we were lucky enough to have Bobby Ryan on this earth protecting our City, even if the time that he had here was much too short."

This morning in Rockville Center, the funeral was held for Leah Walsh, the Long Island teacher murdered by her husband earlier this week. A neighbor told Newsday that every seat was filled in the ceremony that was followed by her burial in Pinelawn. Those in attendance did not include the family of William Walsh, the man being kept in solitary after being arrested for the murder of his wife. Today's Post explores the history of the couple, painting an ugly picture of Leah living in fear of her hard drinking and sometimes violent husband who cops say "slapped around and publicly humiliated (her) as he bedded other women." Neighbors say that police had to visit the Walshes' home more than once, but that Leah never pressed charges against her husband.

Yesterday, funeral services were held for five people killed in a Chelsea apartment fire. Delkis Balbuena and her three daughters, ages 15 months, 3 years, and 8 years, and her 10-year-old, were mourned by family and friends--who gasped at the sight of the five coffins-- at Saint Elizabeth's Church in Washington Heights. The children's father, Maschay Valdez, was separated from Balbeuna but had been visiting during the fire and was buried over the weekend; his sister told NY1, "My father wanted to pay for the funeral for all of them, but the family from the mother side didn't want them to do it all together." The FDNY found that the apartment's smoke detector had been disabled--please check your smoke detectors monthly.

Yesterday, hundreds gathered at a church in Whitestone, Queens to say good-bye to George Dillman, the 26-year-old Con Ed worker who was killed on the job last week. Dillman had been splicing cables in a manhole in Brooklyn and was trapped when an explosion occurred. Newsday reports that Dillman was "dressed in denim bearing the utility logo" that he "proudly wore." His fiancee (who he planned to marry next year), sisters, and the Hicksville fire chief (Dillman was a volunteer) all gave eulogies in the packed church where he was baptized, had his first communion, and was confirmed. A former teacher said, "He always worked, he always tried."

Yesterday, the funeral for NYPD Lieutenant Michael Pigott, who killed himself a week after issuing a command that led to a man's death by Taser, was held in Islip, Long Island. Hundreds of police officers were on hand to remember the 21-year veteran of the force, who left behind his wife and three children. Rev. Douglas Madlon revealed during the service that Pigott, stripped of his badge and gun, was afraid he wouldn't be a police officer and had said to him, "I'm not a desk person." One fellow cop told Newsday, "It's a horrible, horrible thing. He was a great man. He was a cop's cop." And while there was bitterness from some police officers and even Pigott's own father towards the NYPD, Police Commission Ray Kelly attended the wake over the weekend but not the funeral "out of sensitivity to the family."

The family of the disturbed man who fell to his death after being Tasered by police will likely sue the city, surprising no one. Famous civil rights lawyer Ron Kuby is now representing relatives of Iman Morales, whose funeral service was held yesterday in Greenwich Village. Kuby tells the Daily News, "The first thing the family is focused on is burying their son. But the city has already acknowledged what any idiot on Earth could see - that they [the cops] acted irresponsibly and wrongfully and caused a man's death."

Funeral services will be held Thursday for the disturbed man who fell to his death last week after being Tasered by police. The NYPD's entire Emergency Service Unit was retrained today on proper Taser procedures, although police Commissioner Ray Kelly says the man's death was a mistake in judgment, not a product of poor training. He tells Newsday, "We think the training they receive is sound. We're human beings. Sometimes we make mistakes. Reporters make mistakes. People on Wall Street make mistakes." The lieutenant who ordered the Taser shot, Michael Pigott, has been stripped of his badge and gun, and according to the Post, he gave the order when the man, Inman Morales, began poking at another officer with a florescent light bulb. The officer, who was standing on the fire escape, "wasn't tied in [securely]" and was in danger, the unidentified source claims.

Yesterday, mourners attended the funeral of the pregnant traffic agent fatally struck in the Bronx and the baby son she never knew. Donnette Sanz and Sean Michael Justin Sanz were buried together in the same casket; she had died on August while her son was born but only lived a week until last Friday. Wdower Rafael Sanz "broke down" when he was given the flag from the coffin.

Yesterday, friends, family, and others gathered for the funeral of 49-year-old Esmin Green, whose death in a Kings County Hospital emergency room was captured on surveillance video. Green, who had been waiting for almost 24 hours for medical attention, had collapsed onto the floor; though many staffers saw her on the floor, nothing was done until a nurse (who kicked her gently) realized she was unconscious an hour later.

After being rocked by the death of Esmin Green, a psychiatric patient who died at Kings County Hospital, the city announced it would pay for her funeral expenses. A video showed Green waiting in the waiting room for almost 24 hours, collapsing to the floor with numerous staffers ignoring her. Mayor Bloomberg said developer Forest City Ratner will fly Green's relatives from Jamaica to NYC and back, as well as fly the body back to Jamaica. Though six staffers have been fired, Green's daughter told the Daily News, "I'm going to put it in the hands of American law. But I can tell you this: That hospital, it needs to be closed down."

Yesterday, a funeral was held for three-year-old Kyle Smith, who died under the care and apparent abuse of family friends. Family members, friends and neighbors shed tears and voiced regrets over the child's death.

After a public scrutiny over police procedure when dozens of youths were arrested on their way to a gang members' wake, the Brooklyn DA's office has decided to drop the charges of 22 of the arrestees. Ten others will face charges.