Results tagged “stalbans”

The Queens woman who steered a van full of foster children into oncoming traffic Monday night had alcohol in her system and a crack pipe in her... possession, investigators say. The horrific crash claimed the lives of two of the five children in the van, but driver Sheila Bethea, 45, survived. Yesterday prosecutors charged her with manslaughter, assault, and endangering the welfare of a child. One witness tells the Times the crash "sounded like a truck hit a building."

LGBTQ advocates are pushing the state legislature to amend New York's hate crime law to include gender identity. Under the current state law, prosecuters can classify assault as a hate crime if it stems from the victims' sexual orientation, but crimes against transgender victims do not necessarily qualify. One of the leading advocates for reform is Carmella Etienne, 23, who was attacked in Queens in July by two men shouting anti-gay slurs and threatening to cut her throat.

A 22-year-old woman who had survived being shot in the torso just this past spring was shot again at the same spot Saturday in a drive-by, this time the incident proving fatal. Shante Graham was at a party with friends on Nashville Boulevard in St. Albans when two men opened fire from inside a dark sedan at around 12:30 a.m. yesterday morning. Graham was shot in the stomach and would later be pronounced dead at Jamaica Hospital. Two other people at the party were shot and treated at other hospitals, both listed in stable condition. Graham had just attended a memorial earlier in the day Friday for a friend who was killed in a domestic dispute. Graham's mother told the Times that her daughter had fallen in with a bad crowd, saying, “She was around negative people, doing nothing, hanging in the streets, not doing anything with herself.” ' Her mother also added that Graham aspired to be a school safety officer or a crew member at JFK. Police found the vehicle the shots were fired from near the party, abandoned in a parking lot.

St. Albans, Queens is on high alert this morning as a fugitive chicken runs wild through the community. A report just came in over the wires that an Emergency Services Unit is on the scene and trying to "coral" [sic] the loose chicken somewhere in the vicinity of Linden Boulevard and 197th Street. It's unclear why the chicken is crossing roads in Queens, but residents are strongly advised to remain indoors and prepare for this weekend's avalanche of neighborhood fowl jokes. Developing...

Two men have been arraigned on charges of assault as a hate crime after an alleged rock-throwing attack on a transgender female in Queens on Wednesday night. Carmella Etienne, 22, says she walking by the corner of 116th Avenue and 199th Street in St. Albans when two men shouted anti-gay slurs and threatened to cut her throat. (NY1 reports they even threatened to sodomize her with a baseball bat.) After promising to call the police, the two suspects allegedly said, "The police don't care about you, they won't do anything to us." Rocks and a bottle were thrown, and Etienne sustained a deep cut to her leg.

It's hard out there for a pig these days. The Post reports on a 300-pound pot-bellied pig named Romeo, a family pet in Queens' St. Albans section, who is turning into "a porky pariah" with his neighbors in our time of swine. Who does Romeo live next to—Joe Biden? No, not Amtrak Joke, but he does reside a few doors away from 83-year-old Mary McPherson, who says, "It shouldn't be here. I've never heard of pigs as pets, and with the flu, it worries me." Since swine flu is thought to be spread through close contact among pigs and Romeo is a Napoleon Solo, it is highly unlikely that he is a carrier of the virus. Eight year-old owner Jolisa Cummins adds, "I watched about [the flu] on TV, and I was worried he could get sick. But he's never been to Mexico." If the neighbors take their case to the city however, they could get Romeo banished—pot-bellied pigs are not allowed by the city as pets. Jolisa's father had bought Rome as a gift to her mother Lisa, who grew up on a farm in Trinidad.

A suspect was injured in an overnight shootout with police during a high-speed chase that ended in the St. Albans section of Queens. Around 3:30 a.m., Nassau County police began pursuit of the green van that matched the description of the getaway car from a home invasion robbery reported while it was in progress in Elmont, Long Island. Suspects fired at police and twice hit the cop car, but neither officer inside was wounded. A police official told the News, "Shots started to come out of the van toward our officers. There were exchanges over possibly two miles." Soon after crossing the border into Queens, the van was sidelined with a blowout, leading police apprehending four suspects, one of whom has been shot in the arm in the crossfire. Inside the van, cops found a semiautomatic rifle and a revolver. Two other cops were injured in an accident while responding to the scene. None of the reported injuries were life-threatening.