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CBS News
07-06-2025
- CBS News
Bronx community marches in honor of Gun Violence Awareness Day after rash of shootings
Over the last few days, there have been multiple reports of gun violence in the Bronx. Hoping to make the violence stop, many went out into the community Friday, spreading the message on Gun Violence Awareness Day. "We're doing prevention, intervention, we're doing it all" Community members gathered to march for a purpose wearing bright orange shirts and chanting from the streets from La Central YMCA to St. Mary's Park in the Bronx. The march was in honor of National Gun Violence Awareness Day and to kick off Gun Violence Awareness month. Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark hosted the march and a "Plant for Peace" to bed out flowers at St. Mary's Park. "Orange is the color for gun violence awareness. And we're planting on behalf of beautifying the park, but at the same time honoring those who lost their lives to gun violence," Clark said. "So every year now – those plants come back every year, they're perennials ... Every year we'll get to honor, you know, gun violence awareness as well as those lives that were lost." Clark expressed the march and planting for peace are just the beginning for the community to bloom in a new direction. "We have a strategy, where we're doing prevention, intervention, we're doing it all. But it's also something that communities can take ownership. They can say this is a gun violence free zone," she said. 5 shootings in the Bronx in 48 hours In the span of 48 hours, police responded to at least five shootings in the Bronx, leaving six people injured. Police say no arrests have been made in at least four of those five shootings. Police presence was evident throughout parts of the borough Friday evening. Several officers stood outside at least two locations where gun violence sent three teens to the hospital less than nine hours apart. On Thursday afternoon, surveillance video captured people running for cover as gunshots rang out on East 176th Street outside a grocery store. Police said two 17-year-olds were injured; one was shot in the neck and the other was shot in the right arm. Other recent victims of gun violence in the borough include a 17-year-old boy shot in the hip and a 15-year-old boy shot in the thigh. According to NYPD data, as of June 1, shooting victims and incidents are down in the Bronx by at least 18% compared to last year. You can email Erica with Bronx story ideas by CLICKING HERE.
New York Times
11-05-2025
- New York Times
In a Beloved Bronx Park, a Neighborhood's Drug Crisis Is on Full Display
When Martin Rogers's family members left their Manhattan tenement in the 1920s, they sought a new home with access to more green space and open air. They found it in the South Bronx, and at a 35-acre park known as St. Mary's. Mr. Rogers, 70, said he spent many childhood summers playing stickball at St. Mary's and swimming in the pool in its recreation center from the early morning until the streetlights came on. It not only afforded him an escape from his family's small, scorching apartment, but also kept him away from the drugs, riots, crime and poverty that choked the surrounding neighborhood. St. Mary's Park, the largest in the South Bronx, was for decades a refuge for many residents in one of New York City's most impoverished areas. But as the city's homelessness and opioid crises worsened in recent years, it became something else: a place where people shoot up and nod off under stately oak trees, and where the grass and rocks are littered with needles and broken glass. Residents see the transformation of St. Mary's as emblematic of the persistent poverty, drug problems and neglect that plague the South Bronx. They worry that the state of the park helps perpetuate the damaging stigmas surrounding the area as it seeks to fend off gentrification. The community has sought help from the city and state for years, but residents say they have yet to see solutions that work. 'What's happening in St. Mary's Park is a symptom of what's happening in the broader South Bronx,' said Carmen Santiago, who lives nearby and advocates cleaning up the park. 'The situation is just a perfect storm.' Ms. Santiago, 61, an Army veteran and retired construction manager, walks the length of St. Mary's picking up litter week after week. On a recent day, she entered at East 149th Street and St. Ann's Avenue and headed up a grassy hill toward a rocky peak, dodging needles, shards of glass and human feces with each step. Atop the hill, an empty blue pouch labeled 'Overdose Rescue Kit' dangled from a tree, flapping in the wind. The ground beneath it was covered with naloxone containers, needle caps and trash. 'Seniors don't come here anymore and walk around,' Ms. Santiago said. 'My mom is 85, and she's like, 'I'm not going there.'' In the back of Ms. Santiago's mind was her nephew, whom she described as a middle-aged man who has struggled with substance abuse. Friends have spotted him using drugs in the park and a few blocks away at the Third Avenue Hub, a busy commercial corridor lined with stores and public transportation stops. Each time she steps outside, Ms. Santiago said, she hopes she won't find her nephew's dead body. Police officers at the 40th Precinct, which covers the Port Morris, Mott Haven and Melrose neighborhoods, have described the Hub as a central location where people buy drugs, score free syringes and steal from stores. If they overdose, they are just blocks away from a hospital. In February, Mayor Eric Adams announced that the city's Community Link program, which creates local coalitions among community leaders, law enforcement and city agencies to address chronic quality-of-life problems, would begin work at the Hub. The program has also focused on six other neighborhoods since 2023. Camille Joseph Varlack, the deputy mayor for administration, said the area's 'systemic challenges' made it a good candidate for the program. She said her office had held monthly meetings with local stakeholders to track the effort's progress. 'I think the local feedback has been incredibly positive,' she said. 'Our goal is to ultimately empower our community stakeholders so that when we do pull back the city resources, perhaps to go to another area that is similarly challenged, they've got points of connectivity we've created.' The city's parks department has said that cleaning up St. Mary's Park is a priority. In recent years, the department has spent about $50 million to improve the park's amphitheater, recreation center, restrooms, dog run and playgrounds, according to Gregg McQueen, a spokesman. It collected more than 34,000 syringes in the park last year alone. Those investments were warmly welcomed, but residents continue to witness the everyday hardships that have contributed to the park's decline. Data gathered by the city's health department in 2023, the most recent year available, showed that neighborhoods in the South Bronx had the highest overdose rates in the city, as they did in 2021 and 2022. The agency found that 858 Bronx residents died of overdoses in 2023. Hunts Point and Mott Haven, near St. Mary's, were particular hot spots. South Bronx residents face 'chronic health, economic and environmental challenges' and have shorter life expectancies than the city at large, according to an economic snapshot of the area produced by the state comptroller's office in 2023. Another report that year, published by the city comptroller's office, found that those disparities pervaded the city's infrastructure. 'Undesirable' facilities, such as homeless shelters and substance abuse treatment centers, were disproportionately concentrated in low-income communities of color, it said, while richer neighborhoods had more parks and plazas for recreation. The report urged city officials to refrain from further flooding certain neighborhoods, including in the South Bronx, with shelters and treatment centers. Such facilities are often viewed as a 'drag on quality of life,' the comptroller's office wrote, while parks are amenities that serve as 'essential infrastructure for New Yorkers' physical, mental and social health.' While neighbors express concern that the park has become a magnet for homeless people and drug users, those who work with New Yorkers struggling with addiction and mental illness emphasize the need for compassion. Joseph Ruffalo is a recovery peer worker with Samaritan Daytop Village, one of several nonprofits providing substance abuse treatment and other services to residents of the South Bronx. 'We see the good, the bad and the other,' he said. 'They are just caught in the grips of addiction and mental health issues.' Mr. Ruffalo, 61, is part of his organization's harm-reduction outreach team. For him, the work is personal. He is almost two years sober after a decades-long battle with addiction. A former Wall Street stockbroker, he said he used drugs to cope after being abused as a child. He found Samaritan Daytop after he was forced to check into a psychiatric ward. He now spends most days in and around St. Mary's with a small cart in tow, offering people sandwiches, overdose rescue kits and wound care. He encourages them to visit his group's headquarters to eat a meal, shoot a round of pool or watch a movie. Sam Rivera, the executive director of another harm reduction nonprofit, OnPoint NYC, said that people using drugs to cope with trauma often do not have anywhere to go. That is what leads them to quiet places like St. Mary's. 'Within those trees you see the poverty, you see dirt, you see trash,' he said. 'And that's not because these are bad people. This is what our folks have been given.' OnPoint sends cleanup crews into hot spots, including the park, to pick up needles and drug paraphernalia left behind. Workers also encourage people to visit overdose prevention centers where they can use drugs in private, under supervision. Despite those efforts, many residents say they avoid St. Mary's, fearful of stepping on scattered needles or otherwise being harmed. Willie Estrada, 68, who has lived in the South Bronx for decades, has watched with frustration as the park fell into disrepair. He often looks down at the park from his window, he said, yearning for the days when children spent all day running among its trees and sliding down its rocks. Mr. Estrada, formerly a member of the Imperial Bachelors gang, said spending time at St. Mary's in his youth helped steer him away from a life of street violence. The recreation center offered a place to hang out and more productive activities, like dance parties and photography lessons, he said. Teenagers were not allowed to wear gang colors inside, and he eventually stopped wearing them altogether and left the gang. He went on to become a professional dancer and promoter. But now, he said, the park has become so 'disgusting' that he does not allow his grandchildren to play there. The poor conditions have reinforced existing stereotypes about the South Bronx, according to Steven Payne, the director of the Bronx County Historical Society. He lamented that the perception of the area as dirty and dangerous has persisted despite the efforts of local leaders and organizations. 'When you spend more than two seconds in the neighborhood, there's so many amazing groups, so many amazing individuals that do work to try and improve the daily lives of other people,' Mr. Payne said. 'But all that gets lost.' South Bronx lifers like Mr. Rogers and Ms. Santiago, who hold out hope that the park can be restored, said they were determined to keep pushing for solutions. 'We endure on behalf of our kids,' Mr. Rogers said, 'and because people don't have a choice.'
BreakingNews.ie
07-05-2025
- BreakingNews.ie
Man who hid cocaine, cash and phone in underwear jailed for five years
A Limerick man who was caught by gardaí with over €17,000 worth of cocaine hidden in his underwear has been jailed for six years with the final year suspended. Evan McNamara (31), of St Columcille Street, St Mary's Park, Limerick, produced a cling-film wrapped package from his underwear containing €17,367 of cocaine, cash and a mobile phone when he was stopped and searched by gardaí at Dublin Road in Limerick on March 5th, 2023. Advertisement McNamara, a father of three, told gardaí he was moving the drugs for others that he did not identify, in order to help clear a €70,000 personal cocaine debt he had amassed to criminals. He claimed he had been 'under pressure' to move the drugs and that he did so out of fear for the safety of his family. Sentencing judge Colin Daly said: 'Gardaí do not believe this and believe that he [McNamara] was more heavily involved in the sale and supply of drugs.' During a follow-up search of McNamara's home on March 16th, 2023, gardaí recovered benzocaine, a cocaine cutting agent. McNamara also took responsibility for a further €9,121 of cocaine found in a subsequent search of his parents' home at Flood Street, Killalee, the court heard. Advertisement Prosecuting counsel John O'Sullivan BL said gardaí believe McNamara was heavily involved in the sale and supply of drugs in the St Mary's Park area of Limerick. The court heard McNamara is his mother's carer and is in receipt of a carer's allowance. Judge Daly said McNamara had 10 previous convictions, including eight for road traffic offences and two for possessing small quantities of drugs for his own use. Ireland Man jailed for helping Brazilian cartel smuggle co... Read More McNamara pleaded guilty before Limerick Circuit Criminal Court to one count of possessing cocaine worth over €13,000 for sale/supply; to one count of possessing cocaine, and to two counts of possessing benzocaine. Advertisement His barrister, senior counsel Lorcan Connolly, said McNamara had made efforts to change his life and had engaged with community employer Limerick City Build, founded by businessman Ray O'Halloran. Judge Daly said he 'satisfied' it would have been 'unjust' to impose the presumptive mandatory minimum 10-year sentence for possessing drugs worth more than €13,000, as McNamara had no prior convictions for drugs sale/supply and his guilty pleas were of assistance to the State. Judge Daly imposed consecutive sentences of three-and-a-half years and two-and-a-half years with the final 12 months suspended for a period of six years, and entered McNamara into a bond which would trigger the activation of the suspended 12 months if he is convicted of any other offence within the next six years.
