Police investigating the notorious Gilgo Beach murders announced Friday that have identified the victim previously known as Jane Doe No. 7 as a 34-year-old Manhattan woman.
Karen Vergata is believed to have disappeared around Feb. 14, 1996, Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney said Friday morning.
Though shootings and murders in the city are down, the amount of unreported or unrecorded crime—like rampant package theft—remains immense.
Progressive politicians and their allies in the media have been running victory laps over New York City crime statistics. It’s true—and salutary—that shootings and murders have declined, though not to their pre-pandemic lows. Mayor Eric Adams and the NYPD deserve credit for going after the gangs and crews known to commit the preponderance of the city’s gun crimes.
But we should take much of the rest of the city’s crime data with a pinch, if not a full shaker, of salt. Most New Yorkers would agree that street crime, arbitrary mayhem, and general hostility are all trending the wrong way. Compstat data may say that shoplifting is down—but if that’s true, why are so many stores locking away anything that can’t be nailed to the floor? And how many victims of muggings or “minor” assaults have simply decided that it’s not worth the bother of filing a police report, when the perpetrator, if he is even caught, will likely walk away with few consequences?
Some are not impressed with Canada’s new justice minister appearing to downplay concerns about crime rates.
On July 31, Arif Virani, MP for Toronto’s Parkdale-High Park riding who was appointed justice minister in last week’s cabinet shuffle, was quoted in a story by Reuters saying it is unlikely Canadians are more at risk from crime.
“I think that empirically it’s unlikely, … but I think there’s a sense coming out of the pandemic that people’s safety is more in jeopardy,” he said, while acknowledging that people are feeling more at risk.
Statistics Canada has produced a worrisome new data set that shows violent crimes are now on the rise again.
This news likely won’t surprise that many people. While there hasn’t previously been much hard data to confirm it, what we witness in the news and on social media certainly gives us that impression. The question now is what to do about it.
Gun control and blaming racism are no substitute for personal responsibility.
33 people were shot over the weekend in Chicago. Urban gangland violence like that is what real “mass shootings” look like and finally a Journal of the American Medical Association paper addressed the problem by shifting the blame to something it calls “structural racism”.
The members of the class of 1983 slapped on their 40th reunion name tags and hit the open bar to reminisce. They squeezed into Johnny McGorey’s Pub across from the Massapequa Park train
station on Long Island last weekend, among them former athletes, prom sweethearts and yearbook fixtures.
But the buzz of the reunion was the phantom of Berner High School: Rex Heuermann had suddenly made a name for himself days before, when prosecutors accused him of being a serial killer.
Jacob Hoggard’s northern Ont. sexual assault trial to be held fall 2024
Trial dates are set for disgraced Canadian musician Jacob Hoggard — who is facing another sexual assault charge in northern Ontario — but they are more than a year away.
Hoggard, the frontman for the band Hedley, was convicted last June of raping an Ottawa woman in 2016 and is currently out on bail while appealing his five-year prison sentence in that case.
He was found not guilty at that same trial of groping and raping a teenage fan.
Canada saw a surge in vehicle theft and robberies in 2022, as police-reported crime rose for the second successive year.
A new report released by Statistics Canada on Thursday showed that the incidence and severity of crime – as measured by the Crime Severity Index (CSI) – in the country increased by four per cent compared to the previous year.
Video shows victim being thrown from moving car during violent carjacking in Mississauga
h/t Mauser
The Department of Justice (DOJ) dropped a campaign finance charge against disgraced former crypto tycoon Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) on Wednesday night, according to a court document from the Southern District of New York.
Authorities assert that SBF, co-founder of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, and its associates, utilized customer deposits for $90 million in campaign contributions to around 300 candidates or political action committees, according to The New York Times. The DOJ’s letter to the New York court states that it is not pursuing the charge because The Bahamas did not plan to extradite SBF to the U.S. on it.
Talk about a technicality.
🚨BREAKING: The U.S. Department of Justice Dropped Charges of Campaign Finance Violations Against Crypto Scammer FTX Founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
DOJ just sent a strong message that scamming people of millions is not a crime as long your donations end up supporting Democrats and… pic.twitter.com/g3gVwQrn0f
— I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 (@ImMeme0) July 27, 2023
h/t Mauser
Disgraced FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been slapped with a gag order preventing him from speaking publicly about his blockbuster trial in October, as prosecutors lobbied a federal judge to jail him until the case is heard.
The 31-year-old former crypto billionaire was back in a Manhattan courthouse Wednesday after allegedly trying to tamper with the testimony of the prosecution’s star witness, his ex-girlfriend and former business partner Caroline Ellison.
Prosecutors alleged that he leaked intimate messages from Ellison to the New York Times to discredit her, because she is expected to testify against him during his trial.
The most-robbed Walgreens in the nation saw its latest thefts captured on camera — in the middle of a journalist’s televised report on the rampant crime at the San Francisco store.
CNN Senior National Correspondent Kyung Lah was at the store on Monday night to report on the store’s latest anti-theft tactic — chaining the doors to its freezers shut — when she spotted a shoplifter walking out with merchandise in his hands.
NEW: The Walgreens at 16th/Geary in San Francisco has chained up the freezer section ⛓️
Workers said normally shoplifters clean out all the pizza and ice cream every night. They’re usually hit 20x a day. The whole store is virtually locked up. @KPIXtv
h/t @greenbergnation pic.twitter.com/lfFWmkLWdo
— Betty Yu (@bett_yu) July 18, 2023
Kenneth Law, 57, is accused of selling over 1,200 kits to vulnerable people contemplating suicide around the world. Law’s alleged offerings, displayed on now-defunct websites with names like “Imtime Cuisine” and “Escape Mode,” ranged from sodium nitrite, a lethal substance which can kill humans in small doses, to flow regulators and gas masks.
An April investigation by the Times of London shoved Law into the international spotlight, leading to his eventual arrest by Peel police. The Times investigation caught Law on tape advising how to use his products, as well as assuring the reporter that “many, many people” had died taking sodium nitrite. Law later confirmed those details in-person when the Times spoke with him outside a post office in Mississauga.
Mexican cartels are quietly expanding their global criminal empires to include mass theft operations targeting big-box stores, luxury retail brands, and small businesses, then selling the stolen goods online and laundering the profits through Chinese brokers.
The same transnational criminal organizations, known as cartels, that have facilitated the greatest-ever human smuggling operation across the U.S.-Mexico border over the past two years and simultaneously caused the fentanyl epidemic in America now have a hand in organized retail crime.
Retail crime is driven by reduced penalties and organized gangs, not economic hardship.
A recent video on Twitter showed a supermarket employee tussling with a shoplifter who had filled her bag with items. As the employee pulled the bag from her hand, she cried, “I have to feed my family!” That’s a common refrain from shoplifters these days, echoed in media headlines proclaiming that people have turned to stealing to put food on the table—despite a U.S. social safety net that includes $185 billion in spending on food stamps and other nutrition-assistance programs. In truth, America’s exploding shoplifting problem predates our current economic difficulties. Much of the stealing, store owners and security experts say, has less to do with putting food on the table than with a rise in organized theft, and it’s having a particularly adverse effect in cities where criminal-justice reforms have made it easy to get away with.
Investigators uncovered a massive walk-in vault — but no soundproof room — during their ongoing search of suspected Gilgo Beach killer Rex Heuermann’s Long Island property, police said Monday.
Suffolk County Police Commissioner Rodney Harrison called the 12-day search of Heuermann’s Massapequa Park property “fruitful,” saying he hoped cops will be able to wind down their work either Tuesday or later in the week.
