A man with a handgun restrained employees and customers at a Huntington Station store before robbing the place, and police said the incident was similar to others that happened across Long Island in the last few months.
According to the Suffolk County Police Department, the suspect entered the Pier 1 Imports on East Jericho Turnpike with the weapon at about 7 p.m. last night and forced employees and customers to the rear of the store, which is near New York Avenue. After restraining them, he made an employee open the store’s safe and he removed cash from the registers.
Police said the armed robbery was similar to crimes that have happened in Nassau and Suffolk counties since late August, including four robberies at women’s clothing stores — on Sept. 7 in East Farmingdale, on Oct. 12 in West Babylon, on Oct. 26 in Deer Park and on Nov. 2 in North Lindenhurst.
The male suspect in the Pier 1 armed robbery was described as black, between 5 feet 10 inches and 6 feet tall, and of a thin to medium build, police said. He was wearing a mask and a hoodie at the time of the crime.
Detectives from the SCPD’s Pattern Crime Unit are investigating the incident and Suffolk County Crime Stoppers is offering a cash reward of up to $5,000 for information that leads to an arrest.
Anyone with information about the crime is asked to call Crime Stoppers anonymously at 800-220-TIPS.
The issue of drug abuse will be brought to the forefront in a few weeks, as the Port Jefferson Village Board of Trustees dedicates its next meeting to a community discussion on the topic.
That meeting on Dec. 7 is being moved to Earl L. Vandermeulen High School, where school, village and police officials will meet for a forum called The Ugly Truth.
“Although we have all read and heard the headlines about heroin in our neighborhoods and the dangers of easy access to powerful prescription medication, we rarely hear The Ugly Truth behind these headlines,” according to a flyer advertising the joint event.
Suffolk County Police Department officials, including the chief medical examiner and a school resource officer, will tell parents the signs of heroin and prescription drug abuse among teenagers and what can be done about it.
The village trustees will hold their work session meeting at 6 p.m. that day at the high school on Old Post Road, then attend the forum at 7 p.m. in lieu of holding a public comment period at Village Hall as usual. The public comment period will instead be held at the board’s following meeting, on Dec. 21.
Drug addiction and abuse is a topic that hits home in all Long Island communities, but it has been a particular point of friction in Port Jefferson and Port Jefferson Station because of a visible homeless population and the presence of various community services catering to that group, such as a soup kitchen network and a homeless shelter.
The John Hopkins Center for Talented Youth has named Port Jefferson eighth-grader Lucas Rohman one of the brightest middle school students from around the world. Photo from Port Jefferson school district
The Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth recognized a local middle school student recently, naming him one of the brightest in the world.
According to a press release from the Port Jefferson school district, eighth-grader Lucas Rohman received the honor based on his performance on the SAT and the ACT — tests classically taken by high school students getting ready to apply to college.
While more than 30,000 students participated in the center’s annual talent search, Lucas was one of 1,175 students chosen, qualifying him for “challenging and inspiring” programs and classes through the center, according to the organization’s website.
The talent search was open to students in second through eighth grade.
Lucas is a member of the Port Jefferson Middle School’s National Junior Honor Society and its Science Olympiad team, according to the school district. The boy said in a statement that he felt honored to be recognized.
“It has opened up a lot of opportunities to further my studies,” he said.
A 15-foot trailer was stolen from a Commack business in the middle of the night, according to the Suffolk County Police Department, and authorities want help to find out who is responsible.
Police said the $8,000 trailer was snatched from Trailer City on Jericho Turnpike overnight between Nov. 16 and Nov. 17, although it was unclear if one person of multiple perpetrators were to blame. The suspect or suspects are wanted for grand larceny in the theft from the business, located just west of Siracusa Boulevard.
Detectives from the SCPD’s 4th Squad and Suffolk County Crime Stoppers are looking for the public’s help to identify and locate the person or people who committed the crime.
Crime Stoppers offers a cash reward of up to $5,000 for information leading to an arrest. Anyone with information is asked to call them anonymously at 800-220-TIPS.
Study could help officials push along revitalization
One blighted uptown property, the old diner on Main Street, was demolished earlier this year. File photo by Elana Glowatz
An upcoming study of blight along Main Street in uptown Port Jefferson could help the village revitalize the area, according to the officials who set it into motion.
The board of trustees approved the study at a recent meeting, in part to identify properties that potentially could be seized through a process called eminent domain, in which a municipality takes control of land to perform a public benefit and compensates the owner. Although eminent domain is classically used for public works projects like building new roadways or widening existing ones, Village Attorney Brian Egan explained that the Port Jefferson government could use the coming analysis of blight uptown as ammunition to make a case for applying eminent domain to less common purposes.
Seizing blighted properties along Main Street in the village’s troubled uptown area could help officials push along their revitalization efforts there.
Although cleaning up upper Port and creating a more pedestrian-friendly district with both business and residential space has been a priority for some years, progress has been slow. Residents and some local business owners have been calling for improvements as well, citing safety concerns stemming from a roaming homeless population and drug-related crime. One of the more recent and most visible changes to Main Street occurred when the decrepit, crumbling diner — previously known as the Station Diner and the Old Port Diner — was demolished in January, after months of discussion between officials and the property owner. However, a new building has still not been erected in its place.
East Coast-based engineering firm VHB is conducting the blight study. That firm is no stranger to Port Jefferson: In addition to various work around the village, the engineers have completed other projects specifically for the uptown area in the past, including a traffic study that was included in the upper Port revitalization section of the village’s new comprehensive plan.
When the trustees approved the new study on Nov. 2, they specified that it should not take more than 12 weeks to complete.
Detectives are searching for three men they say jumped a pizza delivery person in Northport on Friday the 13th.
According to the Suffolk County Police Department, the trio knocked him to the ground on Main Street that evening, near the intersection with Norwood Avenue, and then repeatedly punched and kicked him as they tried to take personal property from his pockets.
The SCPD said the Northport Police Department is asking the public for help to identify and locate the alleged assailants, who are wanted for attempted robbery because they fled the scene shortly after 8 p.m. without stealing anything.
Police described the suspects as black and between 18 and 22 years old. They were wearing dark-colored hoodies and fled in a late-model, two-door, black Honda hatchback with tinted windows and taillights, a loud muffler and possibly a standard-shift transmission.
Suffolk County Crime Stoppers offers a cash reward up to $5,000 for information that leads to an arrest. Anyone with information about the alleged attempted robbery on Nov. 13 is asked to call them anonymously at 800-220-TIPS.
A fire tears through Malkmes Florists in Port Jefferson Station. Photo by Dennis Whittam
A fire tore through Malkmes Florists in Port Jefferson Station on Friday the 13th, destroying the building but not the family business that has been passed down for generations.
Family heirlooms, flower arrangements, antique furniture — all burned to ashes that morning.
“There’s nothing left,” Lisa Malkmes, one of the owners, said about the property damage in a phone interview Tuesday. “We lost the entire building and all of our computers. Everything’s gone.”
Dennis Whittam, a spokesman for the Terryville Fire Department, said firefighters received a notification that morning of a “fully involved structure fire” across Route 112 from the firehouse, at the longtime neighborhood business at the end of Oakland Avenue.
Firefighters on the scene at Malkmes Florists in Port Jefferson Station. Photo by Dennis Whittam
A Port Jefferson Fire Department engine was the first truck on the scene and started to attack the flames on the exterior, Whittam said, as Terryville’s ladder truck and other engines set up hand lines and master streams under command of Chief Richard McCarren and Assistant Chief Tom Young. The Selden, Mount Sinai and Coram fire departments also offered assistance.
The fire was out by about noon, Malkmes said, and then the florists quickly had to put together flowers for a wedding happening that afternoon, after the bride’s original flowers burned in the blaze. Everything was finished on time, she said, “because of my employees. They opened their home and we were able to get flowers in quick enough.”
She added that the business put flowers together for two weddings and two funerals over the weekend as well.
Malkmes Florists & Greenhouses has been in operation for decades, and was previously run by longtime community member Harold Malkmes, who died in 2011. Malkmes was a 17-term Brookhaven Town highway superintendent who grew up in Port Jefferson Station and studied horticulture in college before taking the helm at the business, which had been in the family since the 19th century. He passed the reins of the shop to one of his sons, Michael, a Miller Place resident who runs the business with wife Lisa.
The Malkmes name is also familiar to town residents who have visited the community man’s other namesake, the Harold H. Malkmes Wildlife Education and Ecology Center in Holtsville.
Lisa Malkmes said the florists are still open for business. They are working on phone orders and will be putting up a temporary structure soon, with the eventual goal of reconstructing the business.
A fire tears through Malkmes Florists in Port Jefferson Station. Photo by Dennis Whittam
This is not the first time the family has had to rebuild.
According to Michael Malkmes, who is also a heavy equipment operator in the town highway department, the business dates back to the 1800s, when it was based in Medford. But a fire tore through that original building, destroying it.
“My grandfather decided to rebuild up here on the North Shore,” Malkmes said Tuesday, and a new shop opened at the end of Oakland Avenue in 1912 called Belle Croft Greenhouses, in honor of a historic name for the neighborhood. That became Malkmes Florists in the 1970s under the ownership of Harold Malkmes.
There were still historical and familial tributes around the shop and property when the fire caught: a picture of Harold playing tennis, a sign from when the man ran for highway superintendent, an aerial photo of the shop from the 1930s, family heirlooms like an antique vanity and curio cabinet, and Harold’s service medal from his time in the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II, as a tail gunner on a B-25 bomber in Italy.
“There’s a lot of tears,” Michael Malkmes said. “We’ve been there for eons so it’s kind of a shame.”
The cause of the fire is still under investigation.
“The building was built in 1912, so the wood was probably a little dry — that’s why it cooked the way it did,” he said. “Once [the fire] punched through the roof, it was just like a chimney.”
But just as before, the family florists plan to rise from the ashes.
“We’re definitely going to rebuild,” he said. “Our customers have been coming there for years.”
Members of the American Legion Wilson Ritch Post 432 stand at attenion in front of their headquarters on Port Jefferson’s East Main Street in the mid-20th century. The post is now based on Hallock Avenue in Port Jefferson Station. Photo from the Port Jefferson Village historical archive
Port Jefferson area residents have a history of serving their country, from the Civil War to more recent conflicts. The community also has a history of honoring veterans and military personnel.
The crew of the N-5 poses aboard the submarine. Photo from the Port Jefferson Village historical archive
Veterans Day has been celebrated since Nov. 11, 1919, when it was known as Armistice Day and marked the anniversary of the end of fighting in World War I.
It was expanded to honor all American war veterans in 1954, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Although the fighting in World War I was overseas, there was an impact close to home. Port Jefferson saw action through sailors aboard the U.S. Navy’s coastal defense submarine N-5, also known as the SS-57. According to the village’s historical archive, that submarine conducted engine trials nearby and later patrolled the Long Island Sound, keeping watch for German U-boats.
Other Navy ships from the Atlantic Fleet passed through during that time as well, including the battleships USS New York and USS Louisiana, both of which maneuvered on the Long Island Sound and anchored just outside Port Jefferson.
Uerda Zena colors before her heart procedure last week. Photo from Debbie Engelhardt
A 4-year-old girl from Kosovo is recovering after a life-saving heart operation on Long Island, thanks to the work of local volunteers.
Mom Barbara Zena comforts Uerda as she recovers from her heart procedure. Photo from Debbie Engelhardt
It took a village to support Uerda Zena. Rotary groups throughout Suffolk lent a hand to the girl and her mother, Barbara, through the Gift of Life program, which works to provide such stateside heart procedures to children from around the globe. Uerda’s Nov. 4 surgery to repair a hole in her heart the size of a nickel was a milestone effort that celebrated the Rotary program’s 40th anniversary.
The atrial septal defect closure performed on Uerda at St. Francis Hospital in Roslyn will add 60 or more years to the little girl’s life, Port Jefferson Rotary member Debbie Engelhardt explained, but the surgery was not available in her home nation.
Engelhardt, who is also the director of the Comsewogue Public Library, said more than 19,000 children from dozens of countries have received life-saving surgeries since the Gift of Life program was born in Suffolk County four decades ago and expanded through Rotary International.
The medical team that took care of Uerda Zena, including Dr. Levchuck second from right, surrounds mom Barbara Zena. Photo from Debbie Engelhardt
Rotary groups in the county are still going strong with Gift of Life, which is doubling up its efforts by providing doctors and medical staff in other countries with equipment and training to perform the heart procedures themselves.
“It’s a unique, renowned and respected Rotary-run program,” Engelhardt said.
Dr. Sean Levchuck, the pediatric cardiologist who performed the life-saving procedure on Uerda at St. Francis, described it as minimally invasive. To close the nickel-sized hole, he fed a catheter “the size of a coffee stirrer” into a vein in her leg and up to her heart, where the catheter deployed a device that, once placed in the hole, expanded to plug it. The cardiologist had to position the device properly while Uerda’s heart was still beating, mostly using ultrasound imaging to guide him.
Barbara Zena and daughter Uerda have fun at Chuck E. Cheese. Photo from Joe DeVincent
The doctor said the procedure took between 45 minutes to an hour and required a team of nurses, an anesthesiologist and techs to assist with the imaging. The hospital donated the use of its facility and staff for the procedure.
Levchuck does about 15 of those procedures a year for Gift of Life, he said, with a fair number of the child recipients coming from Eastern European countries that were formerly part of the Soviet Union. He also sees kids from places like Haiti and Jamaica.
Just like in those other nations, the procedure to repair a hole in a child’s heart is not available in Kosovo, Levchuck said, because the hospitals don’t have the resources to train their staffs to do it. And the kids who are born with those defects are more prone to pneumonia or respiratory infections, which could also be difficult to treat in a developing nation.
“Problems in this country that are seemingly innocent take a whole new look” in places like Kosovo, the doctor said. But he is willing to help: “Keep ‘em coming. … It’s easy to donate time.”
In Uerda’s case, plenty of Long Islanders donated their time, with many people pitching in to make the girl’s medical procedure a reality. Sayville Rotarian Joe DeVincent wrote letters to get the girl a visa, and she and her mother are staying with a host family in Northport while here. DeVincent has also provided transportation to the Kosovan mother and daughter.
Uerda Zena and mom Barbara are all smiles while in the U.S. to repair the girl’s heart defect Photo from Joe DeVincent
The endeavor to save Uerda had an additional element of kids helping other kids — students at St. Anthony’s High School in South Huntington, one of whom is Levchuck’s son, raised funds to bring the girl to the United States from her home in the Kosovan capital, Pristina, where her mother works at a bakery and her father at a public works plant.
“They’re a fine group of students over there that championed a cause,” the doctor said about the St. Anthony’s kids. “When you see something like that, you really get a nice warm feeling about the future.”
Uerda will be staying stateside for a little while longer, and Rotarians are trying to show her a good time. She has already gone on a play date to Chuck E. Cheese and visited a children’s museum, DeVincent said, and this weekend she will go into New York City with her mother and some native Long Islanders to visit Times Square and Rockefeller Center.
“Uerda really enjoys being with her mother,” DeVincent said.
And she has more energy to do these things than before.
After a heart procedure, Uerda Zena is now healthier than ever. Photo from Joe DeVincent
“Her heart’s working better, her circulation’s better,” the Rotarian said. “The kid generally feels better than she has in her whole life. So this is a very happy story.”
Uerda will also appear at a Taste of Smithtown, an event in St. James on Nov. 17, where there will be food from restaurants along the North Shore. The 10th annual event will run from 6 to 9 p.m. at Mercedes-Benz of Smithtown on Middle Country Road and will benefit the Gift of Life program, along with the Smithtown Emergency Food Pantry and the Smithtown Children’s Foundation.
The plan is for the Zenas to head home on Nov. 22, to be reunited with Uerda’s father and her 18-month-old brother.
“Her mother is in touch with her family in Europe through her cell phone and … Uerda has spoken to her brother over the cell phone,” DeVincent said. “She’s actually very maternal toward her younger brother.”
It is a happy ending for both the Kosovo family and Suffolk County Rotarians.
“When you’re doing something like this with an adorable 4-year-old child, it brings you tremendous satisfaction,” DeVincent said. “This is the best way to spread happiness, certainly for these children and their parents but also for yourself. Nothing that I do or have done in my life has brought me as much joy.”
A young Kings Park man was killed in a motorcycle crash early Saturday morning when he collided with a minivan, whose driver was charged with driving without a license.
The Suffolk County Police Department said Christopher Colella, 26, was riding a blue 2004 Suzuki GSX-R600 south on Indian Head Road in Commack when a 1999 Chevrolet Venture turned in front of him and he struck the vehicle.
The minivan had been making a left turn from the northbound side of Indian Head Road onto Somers Lane shortly before 7 a.m.
Colella was pronounced dead at the scene, police said. The minivan’s driver, Marino Guillen, a 57-year-old Brentwood resident, was charged with unlicensed operation of a motor vehicle and was treated for minor injuries at St. Catherine of Siena Medical Center in Smithtown.
Attorney information for the defendant was not immediately available.
Police impounded both vehicles for safety checks.
Detectives from the SCPD’s 4th Squad are investigating the crash.
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