Joining forces — Lawrence Park, Wesleyville explore police merger
Wesleyville and Lawrence Park Police Departments have been serving East Erie County for over a hundred years, but the two departments could look a little different in the coming months.
On Tuesday evening, the two municipalities released a joint statement saying they are exploring plans to potentially combine the police departments under the name East County Regional Police Department.
'There is a lot of opportunity in doing this for saving money, and for getting strength in numbers between the two departments, and really shoring up the financial situation for both municipalities heading into the future,' said Marcus Jacobs, Wesleyville Borough manager.
Jacobs said the municipalities recently requested and received a 'police organization study' from the state, which offers feedback for reorganization based on the experiences of other police departments in the commonwealth.
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'The state is certainly encouraging us to do this because there are dozens and dozens and dozens of examples all across the state of communities doing this very thing, both with their police departments and fire departments. We're the first one in Erie County looking at this, but there is a lot for us to gain from moving forward,' said Jacobs.
On Monday night, Wesleyville and Lawrence Park officials met to discuss the findings of that study and create a 'joint steering committee' to guide the possible formation of a combined police department.
Nothing is set in stone quite yet with the merger between the two police stations, but one officer said her station is quite excited about the opportunity.
'I'm excited for it. I think that it will be good for both departments. We work closely together anyway, so I just think that it will help us to grow in the future,' said Emma Maille, patrol officer with the Wesleyville Police Department.
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The two stations are located under a mile from one another, with only a five-minute drive separating them.
Jacobs said the state study is only the early framework for the merger, and going forward, Lawrence Park and Wesleyville officials are asking the community for their input.
The merger is still far from a done deal.
If you would like to read the full Regional Police Study, you can do so here. If you would like to give feedback regarding the police merger, you can fill out a form here.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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Boston Globe
a day ago
- Boston Globe
Sunny Jacobs, a celebrity after freed from death row, dies at 77
Advertisement Her boyfriend at the time, Jesse Tafero, a petty criminal who had been convicted of attempted rape, was also convicted of murder. He was executed by electric chair in Florida in a notoriously botched procedure in May 1990. It took seven minutes and three jolts, and his head caught on fire. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Ms. Jacobs, whose death sentence was overturned in 1982, was ultimately freed a decade later, when a federal appeals court found that prosecutors had improperly withheld evidence from the defense. She took a plea deal rather than face retrial and was never legally exonerated. It was this story that formed the basis of Ms. Jacobs's subsequent, celebrated tale -- that she had been an innocent, a '28-year-old vegetarian hippie,' as she told The New York Times in a 2011 Vows article about her marriage to a fellow former inmate, Irishman Peter Pringle, who died in 2023. Advertisement A product of a prosperous Long Island family, Ms. Jacobs said she had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, as had Tafero, when the killings took place. Responsibility for them, she said, lay with another passenger in the car, Walter Rhodes, who had also been convicted of petty crimes and who later confessed to the killings of the two officers (though he subsequently recanted, confessed and recanted again, multiple times). Ms. Jacobs's 9-year-old son, Eric, and a baby daughter were also in the car, and they were left motherless by what she claimed was her unjust incarceration. Her story was retold in theater and on film. Off-Broadway, Mia Farrow, Jill Clayburgh, Lynn Redgrave, Stockard Channing, Susan Sarandon, Brooke Shields, and others have all portrayed her in 'The Exonerated,' a 2000 play by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen. It became a Court TV movie in 2005 starring Sarandon. Ms. Jacobs's story was also the basis of an earlier TV movie, 'In the Blink of an Eye' (1996). Barbara Walters once devoted a sympathetic segment to Jacobs on the ABC News program '20/20.' And Shields, along with actresses Marlo Thomas and Amy Irving, attended Ms. Jacobs's wedding to Pringle, in New York, at which Shields wept and said: 'Despite everything they have been through, they are not bitter or jaded. They never closed their hearts.' But the story was more complicated than the one that Ms. Jacobs fashioned over the years, and that was swallowed uncritically by media outlets and by the worlds of stage and screen. A young former reporter, Ellen McGarrahan, who had witnessed Tafero's execution for The Miami Herald and was haunted by it, spent much of the next 30 years digging into what had actually happened that day at the rest stop. She published her findings in a well-received 2021 book, 'Two Truths and a Lie.' Advertisement McGarrahan's meticulous, incisive research -- she left journalism to become a professional private investigator after witnessing the execution -- contradicts Ms. Jacobs's story on almost every point. Ms. Jacobs, Tafero, and Rhodes existed in a murky underworld of violence, drug dealing, gun infatuation, and petty crime, McGarrahan said she found. By the time of the fatal encounter with the Florida state trooper Phillip Black and his visiting friend, Canadian constable Donald Irwin, Ms. Jacobs's charge sheet was already long: arrests for prostitution, forgery, illegal gun possession, contributing to the delinquency of a minor (her then-4-year-old son, Eric), and drug dealing. After the killings, a loaded handgun was found in her purse. Several weapons -- two 9-mm semiautomatic handguns, a .38-caliber Special revolver, a .22-caliber Derringer, a .32-caliber revolver -- were found in the various cars linked to Tafero and Rhodes, McGarrahan wrote. Two eyewitnesses, truckers who were at the scene of the killings, said in court testimony that Rhodes couldn't have been the shooter because they saw that his hands were in the air. Forensic evidence suggested that a Taser shot, setting off the volley of fatal gunfire between the two parties, came from the back of the car, where Ms. Jacobs was sitting with her children. McGarrahan posits that Ms. Jacobs may have at least fired the Taser, which she had purchased months earlier. 'The state's theory was that Sunny fired the Taser and the gun at Trooper Black while he was attempting to subdue Jesse,' McGarrahan wrote, and that 'Jesse grabbed the gun from Sunny and continued firing at both Trooper Black and Constable Irwin.' Advertisement According to a Florida Supreme Court opinion in the case, as Ms. Jacobs was being led away after her arrest, a state trooper asked her, 'Do you like shooting troopers?' Ms. Jacobs was reported to have responded, 'We had to.' When McGarrahan went to find Ms. Jacobs at her home in Ireland many years later, 'a small, plump, wrinkled, gray-haired woman in an oversized green sweater, sweatpants, and wire-rimmed glasses' appeared in the doorway. Ms. Jacobs was wary, and mute on the subject of the Taser. When McGarrahan told her that she was simply seeking to establish the truth about the case, Ms. Jacobs responded: 'I don't think you can know that. I don't think that's knowable.' Sonia Jacobs -- who was also known as Sonia Leigh Linder, Sonia Lee Jacobs, and Sonia Lee Jacobs Linder, according to McGarrahan -- was born on Aug. 24, 1947, in the Far Rockaway neighborhood of Queens. Her parents, Herbert and Bella Jacobs, owned a textile firm. Sunny, as she was known, grew up in Elmont on Long Island. She dropped out of college in 1965 and got married, with a wedding reception at the Tavern on the Green restaurant in Manhattan, McGarrahan wrote. By 1968 -- the state of her marriage at that point is unclear -- she was living with her young son in Miami in a house owned by her parents. Her life, before and after meeting Tafero, was 'drugs, drugs and more drugs,' one informant told McGarrahan. Advertisement In 1982, after the Florida Supreme Court had overturned Ms. Jacobs's death sentence and commuted it to life in prison, her parents were killed that year in a Pan Am plane crash in New Orleans. When she was released 10 years later -- the US Court of Appeals ordered that she be given a new trial, but prosecutors offered a plea deal instead -- Ms. Jacobs had already been the subject of the '20/20' segment. In the years that followed, she taught yoga and became increasingly sought after as a speaker for her views opposing the death penalty. She moved to Ireland sometime in the 2000s. In 2007, she published her autobiography, 'Stolen Time: One Woman's Inspiring Story as an Innocent Condemned to Death.' Facebook messages to her children, Eric Linder and ChrisTina Pafero, were not immediately answered. McGarrahan, reflecting on the saga that she had spent so many years uncovering, said in an interview that with Ms. Jacobs, 'the myth has become the truth.' 'She made herself into the victim,' McGarrahan added. 'It removes the actual victims.' This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Yahoo
Woman Who Spent 17 Years in Prison After Being Wrongfully Convicted of Murder Dies in House Fire
American Sonia "Sunny" Jacobs, who spent 17 years in jail for murders she did not commit, has died after a fire broke out in her cottage in Ireland She and her boyfriend were wrongly convicted after two police officers were fatally shot in Florida in 1976 After her release in 1992, Jacobs, whose story was captured in books and films, advocated for the abolishment of the death penaltyAn American woman who spent almost two decades in prison for murders she did not commit has died after a fire broke out in her home in Ireland. Sonia 'Sunny' Jacobs, 78, and Kevin Kelly were found dead on Tuesday, June 3, after her cottage caught fire in a village in County Galway, the Garda, the local police force, said in a statement obtained by PEOPLE. Kelly was her caretaker, according to her nonprofit, The Sunny Center Foundation. Emergency responders arrived after they received an alert about the fire at 6:19 a.m. local time and found both people dead at the scene. An investigation is ongoing, and the bodies were taken to University Hospital Galway's mortuary, police added. 'The results of the postmortems, along with the findings of the technical examination, will determine the course of the Garda investigation,' the department said. The Chief Fire Officer of Galway Fire and Rescue Services did not immediately respond to PEOPLE's requests for comment. The deadly fire is a heartbreaking ending to a life besieged by challenges. In 1976, Jacobs was a 28-year-old mother of two young children when she and her boyfriend, Jesse Tafero, decided to catch a ride with Tafero's acquaintance, Walter Rhodes, in Florida, The Guardian reported. During the car ride, Rhodes fatally shot two police officers and blamed the murders on Jacobs and Tafero, who were both sentenced to death, according to the outlet. While Tafero died after a botched execution in 1990, Jacobs, the mother of his child, spent five of her 17 years in prison on death row, the paper reported. Jacobs was freed after an appeal court resulted in a new trial, and she accepted a plea deal in 1992, according to The Irish Times. After the murders, Rhodes admitted to shooting the officers, although he later retracted his confession, The Guardian reported. Jacobs wasn't the only one to suffer. Her children, 10-month-old daughter Christina, nine-year-old son Eric, were in the car that life-altering day in 1976. After her arrest, they were raised by Jacobs' parents until the latter died in a plane crash, according to the paper. Despite her family's trauma, Jacobs was determined to live a life of positivity. She built a platform campaigning against the death penalty. 'It was very important, that choice I made to heal, rather than to spend the gift of a new life that I had looking backwards at the wrongs that were done to me,' Jacobs told the Times in 2006. 'And I was able to share that with my children. It meant I am leaving them a legacy of hope and strength rather than defeat and pain.' In 2012, she married Irishman Peter Pringle, whom she had met in 1998 while making an appearance at an Amnesty International event, the paper reported. They bonded over their shared history. Pringle, who died in 2023, was acquitted of the murder of two police officers during a robbery in County Roscommon in 1980, the Times reported. Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. Jacobs' story was captured in her 2008 memoir, Stolen Time, and films, including an international play, The Exonerated, which was adapted into a movie starring Susan Sarandon. She and her late husband created the nonprofit to support other people who have been wrongfully convicted. 'We are all doing life wherever we are,' she said, according to the foundation. 'Every day must be lived to the fullest under the prevailing conditions, with an eye toward betterment. In other words, don't wait until conditions are ideal, because you may never get there.' Read the original article on People
Yahoo
03-06-2025
- Yahoo
Exonerated US death row inmate turned campaigner dies in Irish house fire
Sadness has been expressed after former US death row inmate turned campaigner Sunny Jacobs died following a fire in Ireland. The 77-year-old yoga teacher who was originally from New York was found dead following the blaze at the Sunny Healing Centre in rural Co Galway. She spent 17 years in prison in the US, a number of them on death row, following a conviction for murder. Ms Jacobs was released in 1992 after her sentence and imprisonment were quashed. Irish police said emergency services were alerted to the incident at Gleann Mhic Mhuireann in Casla at around 6.20am on Tuesday. Gardai said the bodies of a woman aged in her 70s and a man in his 30s were recovered from inside the home after the blaze was brought under control by firefighters. They have also appealed for any witnesses to come forward. 'Both bodies were taken to the mortuary at University Hospital Galway for post-mortem examinations, while the scene was preserved for a technical probe,' they said. 'The results of the post-mortem examinations will inform the direction of garda inquiries.' A statement on Ms Jacobs' campaign website confirmed she had died in the incident, along with her caretaker. 'We don't have many details at this time, but investigation is ongoing and our contacts in Galway are providing us with information as it comes in,' they said. 'Sunny was a fierce advocate for justice and a guiding light for many. 'As someone who survived wrongful conviction – including five years in solitary confinement under a sentence of death, and 17 years of imprisonment total – she knew the difficulties of incarceration and the struggle to regain one's footing after being exonerated and released.' They said that Ms Jacobs, along with her late husband Peter Pringle, established The Sunny Centre to help other exonerees through the difficult process of building new lives after being released from prison. 'Together, they brought many exonerees to the centre in Ireland to help them process their trauma and move forward to the next steps of their healing,' they said. 'During and after the pandemic, they continued to support and counsel exonerees remotely by video and phone. 'After Peter's passing in 2022, Sunny continued the work of The Sunny Centre. She hosted exonerees and started a training programme for those who wanted to carry forward her vision to establish similar centres for exonerees within their communities.' The statement concluded: 'Fair winds and full sails on your crossing, Sunny. Your memory is a blessing to us.'
