Was That My Pet Goat In A Jar?

Yesterday my companion came home and asked me if I knew about all the goings on outside. I had sort of turned outside off after moving the cars for alternate side street sweeping when a car alarm went on sounding like some recording of dripping water through a Marshall amplifier on volume "11". I went outside and the street was closed at both ends by police cars, a police services car was a few doors down in the street, a large Medical Examiner van was on the block and the street closed off at both ends by police cars. There were a number of camera crews (NBC, CBS, Cablevision 12) and most of the neighbors were out behind crime scene flagging. Gee just a block or two from where Regis Philbin grew up in the Van Nest/Morris Park section of the Bronx reported by the various television journalists as Pelham Parkway (see Forgotten NY for the Regis 'hood and other interesting New York City areas).

At first I heard the tenants had complained that the heat or hot water wasn't working and the Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) had sent someone to look at the boiler and they had found a human skull and they called the medical examiner who was investigating the scene from about 2:00 p.m. until about 10:00 p.m. Still that car alarm, now boxed in by cars and the large van continued to beep beep beep like a dripping faucet.

It was reported this morning that the house had belonged to a convicted child molester and bottles of animal parts were found, one was being examined to see if it was a human fetus. The building owner was convicted after younger male teens he took cave exploring Upstate New York testified to his molestation at his sleep-away camp. I'd only passed him a few times enough to say hello or hi. Lifelong residents at the time (2000) were quite surprised, he was such a usually pleasant guy.

I went to the edge of the crime tape and saw a Newfield High School alumnus I had attended "Junior" and "Senior" high with Louis Young the investigative television journalist whom I hadn't seen since I once had lunch with him and the injured police officer who was once assigned the duty of guarding the former Mayor's ex-wife, a journalist and actor herself, Donna Hanover. I waved called hey Lou and he recognized me. I never saw him "on the job" missing him once when Eyewitness News was following presidential hopeful Rev. Jesse Jackson's speaking tour on Long Island at Stony Brook University as it was canceled due to Rev. Jackson having a fever, which wearing an orange watch-cap on a break from working in East Patchogue, was a good thing the crowd was kind of hostile.

I had been with a small crew in the woods on the Roe Blvd. site, who requested we go see him speak. Mr. Roe was one of George Washington's spies who owned a tavern in Setauket nearby the university, where he and others gathered information at their peril and delivered it to Washington often through New York City to Connecticut. The Roe House in Selden was pulverized by British Army musket fire because of it but he wasn't home and he would later make cherry-wood furniture on Mud Creek in today's East Patchogue, a small ponded mill there in the 19th century. Upon setting off after George Washington stayed the night in the Roe Tavern, now on the south side of North Country Road, on George Washington's triumphal tour of Long Island after the success at Yorktown, Virginia, his cinch slipped and he fell from his horse and broke his leg and had to stay behind. George Washington was returning in part to where he had been to after the French and Indian War on a doctor's recommendation that he visit to the goings on in Boston, the Bay Colony and had traveled there via the Greenport passage, and perhaps also had visited family ties, as evidenced by some of its more recent residents, particular the hardware store on the old entry of the Sag Harbor Turnpike once toll road in Bridgehampton, NY where Captain Hulbert a noted "East End" patriot in the defense of Montauk Point from the British Navy grew up in his father's cobbler's house. He and a number of men marched up the hills there within the hungry sight of the British Navy offshore, reversed their coats and marched down another side of the hill convincing those off shore of their great number thus protecting the livestock kept there. Washington's diary is interesting in regard to some places on Long Island, always the surveyor he started out as. The Nature Conservancy owns some of the properties along the turnpike today.