Results tagged “representativejosephcrowley”

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that President Bush had signed a "major disaster declaration" for Queens on August 8, the day the weather (including a tornado in Brooklyn and Staten Island) caused much of the city to come to a standstill. This means that Queens residents and business owners will be able to apply for disaster relief.

After both Senate Democrats and Republicans agreed on an immigration bill that will make millions of illegal immigrants legal, there's been a mixed response. Mayor Bloomberg called the guest worker program, which would allow new immigrants to live and work in the U.S. for 2 years, a "feel good kind of law" because "nobody in their right mind is going to leave."

You know that beating of a rookie cop in Queens from yesterday? It turns out that suspect Danny Fernandez was staking out cops so he could steal a gun. Fernandez had been waiting three hours until decided to attack Officer Joseph Cho with a baseball bat in Jackson Heights at 1AM. Luckily, fellow rookie cop Patrick Lynch saw the attack and chased Fernandez - who ended up running into a third rookie, Christine Schmidt. Lynch and Schmidt arrested Fernandez.

A terrible aftermath to Representative Joseph Crowley's holiday party. His staffer Eileen Gillepsie was driving with best friend and former staffer Peggy Bartichek afterwards, and Gillepsie drove down the wrong way on a Queens street. Her car was hit by a town car and "slammed" into a parked truck. From the NY Times:

They were headed home about 12:50 a.m. yesterday, the police said, when Ms. Gillespie, heading south on 69th Street in Elmhurst, failed to turn off it where it became one way northbound, near the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and was hit by a Lincoln Town Car, which pushed her car into a parked pickup truck. There are do-not-enter signs at 34th Avenue, where southbound traffic is supposed to turn off 69th Street.

Seventy-four year old Bartichek was pronounced dead while 69 year old Gillepsie suffered minor injuries. While the restaurant where the informal office party was held told the Daily News that the guests only had one glass each, Gillepsie reportedly told police she had 2-3 glasses of wine. She refused to take a breathalyzer test, but the hospital took a court-ordered blood sample.

After a week of being powerless or near powerless, thousands of Queens homes and businesses are starting to power back up, but it almost feels like too little, too late. It's already been a week of no food, no hot water and no business for many people, and one family blames the death of a 60 year old father on the blackout. Politicians are also fuming: They want Con Ed CEO Kevin Burke to resign, pissed that Burke minimized the blackout as an "inconvenience," and for Governor Pataki to designate Queens a disaster area. Representative Joseph Crowley said during a press conference, "If this were an area of 100,000 people in upstate New York, the governor would have declared it a disaster area." No kidding.