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Teacher arrested for sexual classroom romps with student www.privateofficer.com
May 30, 2009
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Queens NY May 30 2009
A Queens public school teacher turned a 2nd-floor classroom into an after-school sex den, luring her teenage student into a torrid fling, prosecutors said.
Melissa Weber, 27, a social studies teacher at Middle School/Intermediate School 8 in Jamaica, seduced the 14-year-old male student seven times over the past month, prosecutors said.
She allegedly warned the teen not to tell anyone about their affair – warning him, “I could lose my job and my teaching license.”
Weber is being held pending arraignment in Queens Criminal Court on charges of second-degree rape, sex abuse and endangering the welfare of a child, prosecutors said.
The pair met between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. from Apr. 13 – May 14, prosecutors said.
The sessions came to light when the victim’s mom, who is on the Parent Teacher Association, was tipped off by someone in the school, prosecutors said.
The resourceful mom got Weber’s cellphone number and compared it to her son’s phone.
There were hundreds of exchanges between the pair – including a text message from Weber that read, “erase your phone,” prosecutors said.
A Queens public school teacher turned a 2nd-floor classroom into an after-school sex den, luring her teenage student into a torrid fling, prosecutors said.
Melissa Weber, 27, a social studies teacher at Middle School/Intermediate School 8 in Jamaica, seduced the 14-year-old male student seven times over the past month, prosecutors said.
She allegedly warned the teen not to tell anyone about their affair – warning him, “I could lose my job and my teaching license.”
Weber is being held pending arraignment in Queens Criminal Court on charges of second-degree rape, sex abuse and endangering the welfare of a child, prosecutors said.
The pair met between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. from Apr. 13 – May 14, prosecutors said.
The sessions came to light when the victim’s mom, who is on the Parent Teacher Association, was tipped off by someone in the school, prosecutors said.
The resourceful mom got Weber’s cellphone number and compared it to her son’s phone.
There were hundreds of exchanges between the pair – including a text message from Weber that read, “erase your phone,” prosecutors said.
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Categories: School Employee Arrested
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Woman commits suicide at NY mall www.privateofficer.com
April 9, 2009
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Queens NY April 9 2009
nytimes.com
A woman leaped to her death from the third floor of the Queens Center Mall around 3 p.m. on Wednesday, landing on and injuring a high school student on the lower level of the shopping center in Elmhurst, four stories below. Shoppers screamed and ran. Police officers and the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, arrived to help calm the crowd.
Mr. Brown said the woman was in her early to mid-50s and in the company of two teenagers when she jumped. It appeared that she had leaped from near a T-Mobile cellphone kiosk in the center of the atrium, and landed near a Tax Solvers kiosk on the lower level, set up to deal with the busy tax season.
The glass barrier over which the woman jumped runs around the atrium on each level. The barrier is roughly waist-high and topped by a curved titanium banister. Police and emergency service workers cordoned off sections of the mall and shut down certain escalators leading to the lower level.
The lower level, where the woman landed, was packed with high school students, many of them milling about after school. The injured student was taken to Elmhurst Hospital. He was expected to survive.
The student was identified by family members as Derrik Munoz, 17, who attends Amityville High School.
His father, Ruben Munoz, got word of the injury and happened to be working in the area and rushed to the mall. “I got there at the mall just before they left to take Derrick to the hospital,” Mr. Munoz said in an interview. “We’re waiting to hear from them now, what his status is. They need to do tests on his head.”
The teenager was sitting in one of four leather massage chairs on the lower level of the mall when the woman fell onto him, striking his head, the father said. At the mall, custodians were seen wrapping the four chairs in black plastic to take them out.
A witness, Shanell Williams, 26, said she was serving customers at the NYS Collection, a sunglasses kiosk on the second floor, when she said she heard a loud thump. “First I thought it was a gunshot, and I said ‘I’m out of here,’” Ms. Williams said. “People started screaming. There was pandemonium and chaos. And I looked below to the lower level and people were screaming that someone had jumped from above.”
Ms. Williams said the death left her badly shaken. She said she just wanted to finish her shift and go home.
Geraldine Obregon, 20, a Starbucks employee and a LaGuardia Community College student, was working on the second floor of the mall when the woman jumped. Ms. Obregon said in an interview:
Everybody was running, so I went to the balcony to see what happened. The first thing I saw was the kid sitting on a chair on the lower level looking up with blood gushing from his head. He looked like he was dazed or something, he was just staring around, and there was a lot of blood pouring off of him. Then I saw the woman, she was face down, with her hands sort of by her side. It looked like her hair or a wig had fallen off her head. She didn’t have any shoes or socks on. She wasn’t moving. At first I thought it was some high school kids fooling around and that she had fallen to the basement, but then everybody said that she had jumped and that it was a grown woman. Every bannister in the mall was just covered with people staring at what happened. And then in about two minutes there was, like, a ton of Fire Department and police officers here.
As police officers patrolled the mall, a security guard on duty on the lower level told Time Warner customers: “Time Warner is closed. If you’ve got a bill due, don’t worry about it. They said they won’t cut off your service today.”
nytimes.com
A woman leaped to her death from the third floor of the Queens Center Mall around 3 p.m. on Wednesday, landing on and injuring a high school student on the lower level of the shopping center in Elmhurst, four stories below. Shoppers screamed and ran. Police officers and the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, arrived to help calm the crowd.
Mr. Brown said the woman was in her early to mid-50s and in the company of two teenagers when she jumped. It appeared that she had leaped from near a T-Mobile cellphone kiosk in the center of the atrium, and landed near a Tax Solvers kiosk on the lower level, set up to deal with the busy tax season.
The glass barrier over which the woman jumped runs around the atrium on each level. The barrier is roughly waist-high and topped by a curved titanium banister. Police and emergency service workers cordoned off sections of the mall and shut down certain escalators leading to the lower level.
The lower level, where the woman landed, was packed with high school students, many of them milling about after school. The injured student was taken to Elmhurst Hospital. He was expected to survive.
The student was identified by family members as Derrik Munoz, 17, who attends Amityville High School.
His father, Ruben Munoz, got word of the injury and happened to be working in the area and rushed to the mall. “I got there at the mall just before they left to take Derrick to the hospital,” Mr. Munoz said in an interview. “We’re waiting to hear from them now, what his status is. They need to do tests on his head.”
The teenager was sitting in one of four leather massage chairs on the lower level of the mall when the woman fell onto him, striking his head, the father said. At the mall, custodians were seen wrapping the four chairs in black plastic to take them out.
A witness, Shanell Williams, 26, said she was serving customers at the NYS Collection, a sunglasses kiosk on the second floor, when she said she heard a loud thump. “First I thought it was a gunshot, and I said ‘I’m out of here,’” Ms. Williams said. “People started screaming. There was pandemonium and chaos. And I looked below to the lower level and people were screaming that someone had jumped from above.”
Ms. Williams said the death left her badly shaken. She said she just wanted to finish her shift and go home.
Geraldine Obregon, 20, a Starbucks employee and a LaGuardia Community College student, was working on the second floor of the mall when the woman jumped. Ms. Obregon said in an interview:
Everybody was running, so I went to the balcony to see what happened. The first thing I saw was the kid sitting on a chair on the lower level looking up with blood gushing from his head. He looked like he was dazed or something, he was just staring around, and there was a lot of blood pouring off of him. Then I saw the woman, she was face down, with her hands sort of by her side. It looked like her hair or a wig had fallen off her head. She didn’t have any shoes or socks on. She wasn’t moving. At first I thought it was some high school kids fooling around and that she had fallen to the basement, but then everybody said that she had jumped and that it was a grown woman. Every bannister in the mall was just covered with people staring at what happened. And then in about two minutes there was, like, a ton of Fire Department and police officers here.
As police officers patrolled the mall, a security guard on duty on the lower level told Time Warner customers: “Time Warner is closed. If you’ve got a bill due, don’t worry about it. They said they won’t cut off your service today.”
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Categories: police, security
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Campus security officer, student receives awards www.privateofficer.com
September 13, 2008
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Campus security officer, student receive awards http://www.privateofficer.com
Queens NY Sept 13 2008
By: Rick McCann
Ntl. Assoc. Private Officers
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A campus security officer and a student at St. John’s University in Queens New York are still being called heros months after they subdued an armed masked man carrying a rifle.
A campus security officer and a student at St. John’s University in Queens New York are still being called heros months after they subdued an armed masked man carrying a rifle.
The sight of the armed man had panicked students at St. John’s University last September – just six months after a gunman had killed 32 people at Virginia Tech.
But school officials say that thanks to student Chris Benson and security officer Dan Boylan, the man was captured and no one was hurt.
Benson, 22, a senior from Little Neck, Queens, was chatting on the phone with his girlfriend when he spotted a fellow student, Omesh Hiraman, wearing a Fred Flintstone mask and carrying a rifle in a plastic bag.
“Out of the corner of my eye, I saw this guy wearing a mask and a hoodie. It was 96 degrees out then so it was odd,” recalled Benson, who plans to join the NYPD in January.
His NYPD Cadet Corps training kicked in and he tailed the suspect.
“I was worried he would start shooting into the crowd,” Benson said.
But as the suspect rounded a corner, he smacked into Boylan, 62, a campus security officer and retired NYPD lieutenant.
“I just grabbed the rifle and started yanking it out of his hand,” said the Long Island father of three, calling the struggle a “tug of war.”
The duo took away Hiraman’s .50-caliber weapon and was able to take the man into custody and held him until police could arrive.
Benson and Boylan play down their act of heroism, but university spokesman Dominic Scianna, who nominated them for a Post Liberty Medal in the Courage category, does not.
“Not many people would have stepped in,” he said.
But school officials say that thanks to student Chris Benson and security officer Dan Boylan, the man was captured and no one was hurt.
Benson, 22, a senior from Little Neck, Queens, was chatting on the phone with his girlfriend when he spotted a fellow student, Omesh Hiraman, wearing a Fred Flintstone mask and carrying a rifle in a plastic bag.
“Out of the corner of my eye, I saw this guy wearing a mask and a hoodie. It was 96 degrees out then so it was odd,” recalled Benson, who plans to join the NYPD in January.
His NYPD Cadet Corps training kicked in and he tailed the suspect.
“I was worried he would start shooting into the crowd,” Benson said.
But as the suspect rounded a corner, he smacked into Boylan, 62, a campus security officer and retired NYPD lieutenant.
“I just grabbed the rifle and started yanking it out of his hand,” said the Long Island father of three, calling the struggle a “tug of war.”
The duo took away Hiraman’s .50-caliber weapon and was able to take the man into custody and held him until police could arrive.
Benson and Boylan play down their act of heroism, but university spokesman Dominic Scianna, who nominated them for a Post Liberty Medal in the Courage category, does not.
“Not many people would have stepped in,” he said.
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Categories: awards, security
chris benson, dan boylan, queens ny, st john's university
Security officer aids in rescue of fire victims www.privateofficer.com
June 17, 2008
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Security officer aids in rescue of fire victims http://www.privateofficer.com
Queens NY June 17 2008
BY: Bryan Hill
Ntl. Assoc. Private Officer
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Three people died and five others were injured, two critically, when a fire ripped through a three-story brick building in Queens on Sunday morning and forced people to jump from their windows, police and fire officials said.
Six firefighters received minor injuries in the blaze, at the corner of 69th Street and Metropolitan Avenue in Middle Village. The fire, contained to two apartments of the building, was being investigated as suspicious, the authorities said.
The authorities identified the people killed as Heriberto Garcia-Vera, 68, his wife, Flor Sandoval, 48, and his son, Felipe Garcia, 20. It was unclear whether Mr. Garcia-Vera died inside the burning building or from jumping out. The blaze appeared to have started in the stairwell of the building, which housed Z Star Deli Grocery on the ground floor and apartment units on the next two floors, the fire department said. But the cause of the blaze was still under investigation, according to the Fire Department.
George Zugajewicz, who works as a security officer at an auto shop across the street from the deli, had just walked across the street to the deli when he heard somoe commotion coming from upstairs.
As the store owner, Mohammad al-Matari, was preparing breakfast for Mr. Zugajewicz, he turned and he said, he saw something that seemed more like a scene from a movie than real life: A man and a woman engulfed in flames frantically stumbled into the store.
Mr. Zugajewicz grabbed gallons of spring water and passed them to Mr. al-Matari, who led the burning people outside and doused them with water.
The woman “curled up like a ball,” Mr. Zugajewicz said. “I pushed her down and put the flames out on her chest with my hands.”
Shortly before that, Mr. Zugajewicz said, he heard commotion coming from the floor above. He said it sounded as if people were falling down stairs. The deli was shaking, he said, and things fell off the shelves. But it was only when the flame-covered man and woman ran in that he realized there was a fire.
Mr. Zugajewicz, 43, said the man was screaming: “Help me! Help me! Get the fire out.”
After helping to extinguish the flames, Mr. Zugajewicz said, he heard glass breaking from around the side of the building, which is adjacent to a parking lot. Around the corner he found a man screaming for help from a window. So he rolled a small trash bin beneath the window, and the man jumped into it, his injuries limited to a few scratches, Mr. Zugajewicz said.
Then, back in front of the deli, Mr. Zugajewicz said, he saw a man lowering a woman out of a third-floor window onto a commercial sign attached just below the second floor window, where she awaited help. Before the firefighters could bring a ladder to her, the man jumped out of the window, and they both fell to the sidewalk, Mr. Zugajewicz said.
“I heard a cracking noise and saw blood coming out of her head,” he said. “It was just a frightening, horrible thing to see.”
While the authorities still had not determined what caused the fire, residents said the power went in and out during Saturday night’s severe thunder and lightning storm. When the building did have power, lights were dim and air-conditioners barely worked, residents said.
Authorities credit security officer Zugajewicz for getting involved and his quick actions helping everyone that he could.
Three people died and five others were injured, two critically, when a fire ripped through a three-story brick building in Queens on Sunday morning and forced people to jump from their windows, police and fire officials said.
Six firefighters received minor injuries in the blaze, at the corner of 69th Street and Metropolitan Avenue in Middle Village. The fire, contained to two apartments of the building, was being investigated as suspicious, the authorities said.
The authorities identified the people killed as Heriberto Garcia-Vera, 68, his wife, Flor Sandoval, 48, and his son, Felipe Garcia, 20. It was unclear whether Mr. Garcia-Vera died inside the burning building or from jumping out. The blaze appeared to have started in the stairwell of the building, which housed Z Star Deli Grocery on the ground floor and apartment units on the next two floors, the fire department said. But the cause of the blaze was still under investigation, according to the Fire Department.
George Zugajewicz, who works as a security officer at an auto shop across the street from the deli, had just walked across the street to the deli when he heard somoe commotion coming from upstairs.
As the store owner, Mohammad al-Matari, was preparing breakfast for Mr. Zugajewicz, he turned and he said, he saw something that seemed more like a scene from a movie than real life: A man and a woman engulfed in flames frantically stumbled into the store.
Mr. Zugajewicz grabbed gallons of spring water and passed them to Mr. al-Matari, who led the burning people outside and doused them with water.
The woman “curled up like a ball,” Mr. Zugajewicz said. “I pushed her down and put the flames out on her chest with my hands.”
Shortly before that, Mr. Zugajewicz said, he heard commotion coming from the floor above. He said it sounded as if people were falling down stairs. The deli was shaking, he said, and things fell off the shelves. But it was only when the flame-covered man and woman ran in that he realized there was a fire.
Mr. Zugajewicz, 43, said the man was screaming: “Help me! Help me! Get the fire out.”
After helping to extinguish the flames, Mr. Zugajewicz said, he heard glass breaking from around the side of the building, which is adjacent to a parking lot. Around the corner he found a man screaming for help from a window. So he rolled a small trash bin beneath the window, and the man jumped into it, his injuries limited to a few scratches, Mr. Zugajewicz said.
Then, back in front of the deli, Mr. Zugajewicz said, he saw a man lowering a woman out of a third-floor window onto a commercial sign attached just below the second floor window, where she awaited help. Before the firefighters could bring a ladder to her, the man jumped out of the window, and they both fell to the sidewalk, Mr. Zugajewicz said.
“I heard a cracking noise and saw blood coming out of her head,” he said. “It was just a frightening, horrible thing to see.”
While the authorities still had not determined what caused the fire, residents said the power went in and out during Saturday night’s severe thunder and lightning storm. When the building did have power, lights were dim and air-conditioners barely worked, residents said.
Authorities credit security officer Zugajewicz for getting involved and his quick actions helping everyone that he could.
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Categories: security
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