Talk Bronx New York

Livery cab driver Klever Sailema is shown meeting with the media in this image taken from video, Friday, Feb. 29, 2008 in New York. Sailema, who made headlines this week when he claimed that a passenger had abandoned a baby in his car on Thursday, Feb. 28, was arrested Saturday, March 1, and charged with making up the tale.

 

Robin Carlson, Administrative Director of Emergency Service, holds the baby that was abandoned in a livery cab, during a press conference at St. John’s Hospital in Queens on Thursday, February 28, 2008.

 

Cabby’s ‘Klever’ Story of Abandoned Baby Daniella

A cabdriver who dropped off a baby at a firehouse, claiming someone had left her in his car, was arrested Saturday and charged with making up the tale to help an overwhelmed family abandon the child.

Klever Sailema had been hailed as a good Samaritan after he dropped the baby off Thursday in Queens, saying the child, who was about 6 months old, had been left in his livery cab by a stranger.

The case had captivated the city after pictures of the adorable baby girl — who police now say was born to a 14-year-old girl and a man nearly twice her age — were published in newspapers and broadcast on TV.

The cabbie had told investigators his fare was a nervous-looking man who had gotten in carrying the baby and a diaper bag, then disappeared after asking the driver to pull over so he could make a phone call.

Sailema, 44, provided enough detail that police released a sketch of the suspect. He repeated his tale to reporters at a news conference on Friday.

Police didn’t immediately say what broke the case open, but a family friend, Stuart Caban, said he took the teenage mother to police Friday evening after finding her walking in the Bronx, carrying a newspaper with her daughter’s picture and sobbing.

“She was depressed, scared, crying. She loved her daughter. She wanted to be with her,” said Caban, a 23-year-old bail bondsman.

The girl told her she hadn’t wanted to leave the baby but ran away after a violent fight with the father, Caban said.

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Bronx home where fire killed 10 is visible from PS 73, where teacher Craig Monteverde (below) remembers kids.

Gone But Not Forgotten: The Magassa Family Tragedy Remembered 

The desk in Room 512 of Public School 73 in the Bronx was kept vacant for a long time, a tribute to a boy who died with eight other kids and a woman in the city’s worst house fire in four decades.

But Bandiougou Magassa’s smudged beige desk is occupied now, and the classroom is no longer filled with tears as this year’s fifth-graders happily scramble to finish essays.

From the room’s window, you can see the rear of the still-damaged house where members of two West African families perished: five Magassa children and the wife and four kids of Mamadou Soumare.

In the year since the blaze that tore at hearts across the city, the Magassa family has begun recovering, but Soumare remains bereft.

The school that lost three students and felt a grief second only to that of the families has moved forward and will honor the dead with lasting monuments.

A true symbol of hope from the ashes is first-grader Hatouma Magassa, who was rushed to the hospital that night, her lungs filled with the same smoke that killed her siblings.

In a bright yellow shirt and blue jeans, she walked past the classroom where her brother Bandiougou once studied, smiled and embraced his teacher.

“The Magassa kids love to hug,” teacher Craig Monteverde beamed.

Late on the night of March 7, a space heater’s overheated electrical cord ignited the bedding and a pile of clothes in the ground-level apartment of a four-story brick house at 1022 Woodycrest Ave. in Highbridge.

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Zoning Laws Allows For Unwanted Facilities In The Neighborhood 

EVER since Mike and Delfina Franco moved into their prim white brick house in Pelham Gardens in the northeast Bronx 15 years ago, they had enjoyed the expanse of lush shrubbery and evergreens in the backyard of a neighboring property. For Mr. Franco, the pastoral scene on Astor Avenue offered an unexpected hint of country living in an otherwise densely developed borough.

So his suspicions were aroused last fall when the trees were chopped down and the shrubbery cleared. Soon, he heard that the half-acre property had been sold and that the new owner planned to replace the existing single-family house with a free-standing structure containing four doctors’ suites. A demolition permit for the project was issued last month.

“It’s ridiculous,” Mr. Franco, a retired bus maintenance worker, said of the idea. “I would rather have a couple houses put up instead of a medical facility, with people walking in and out and all the traffic and fumes.”

Building doctors’ offices amid houses is not unique to Pelham Gardens or the Bronx. For decades, the city’s zoning law has allowed medical offices, schools, nursing homes and other community facilities in residential neighborhoods, sometimes to the dismay of local residents who worry about increased noise and traffic.

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“I know the lease says I have to go,” Harold Gregory says. “I can read.”

NYPD Retiree Getting The Boot From Morrisania Apartment

HAROLD GREGORY, 52, was sitting at a desk in his peeling, leaky three-bedroom apartment, in a squat city-owned building on a dreary block of Morrisania in the Bronx. “This building sometimes lacks heat and hot water,” he said, “but it’s better than dealing with a personal landlord.”

Mr. Gregory’s desire to stay put has made him a thorn in the city’s side. He is the first retired alumnus of an 11-year-old city program that waives income ceilings and waiting lists to allow New York City police officers to live in low-rent public housing, as long as they perform some community service and leave when they retire.

Therein lies the problem: Although Mr. Gregory retired as a sergeant in 2005, he still refuses to move out of his apartment, which he shares with his grown daughter and rents for $689 a month.

“I know the lease says I have to go,” said Mr. Gregory, a bulky man with a patience born of 22 years walking a beat. “I can read. But I’ve been respectable, and I’ve been a good citizen. Why should I have to go? All I did was retire honorably from my job. If I had a regular lease, I’d be allowed to stay.”

That argument has not persuaded city officials, who have been trying to evict Mr. Gregory for about a year, taking him to court and eventually sending marshals to his apartment. These officials point out that the program, which seeks to improve safety at public housing and help community relations, is explicitly limited by federal law to working police officers. Currently, 41 police officers live in public housing through the program.

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Congregants at New Life Tabernacle, one of seven storefront houses of worship on a single block in Wakefield in the Bronx. More pictures>>

Church Strip .. A Walk Along Religious Row

AS noon approached on a recent Sunday, the mostly Jamaican congregation of New Life Tabernacle gathered in its small storefront on White Plains Road in the Wakefield section of the north Bronx. Women in elaborate, wide-brimmed hats and men in dark suits filled six rows of pews and two dozen wooden chairs. The pastor’s wife, Paulette Randall, wearing a violet dress and holding a microphone, stood before the congregation.

“Is your soul right with God?” she asked the crowd of about 60, her voice exploding into the microphone. “That is the question.”

As she spoke, the low hum of a bass guitar resonated through the walls. Inside a drab storefront next door, the three-piece Heavenly Sound Band of the Bible Fellowship Pentecostal Assembly was warming up. “Hallelujah be your name!” band members sang as they began the service. A score of West Indian worshipers, standing near their metal folding chairs with hands raised in the air, sang along.

At Maha Shiva Parvati Mandir, a storefront Hindu temple just down the block, a service dedicated to the Lord Ram had just concluded.

“Let the birds and quadrupeds prosper,” the priest had uttered imploringly before a group of about 50 mostly Guyanese worshipers, one of whom pumped a harmonium while another tapped a tabla. “Let peace come from everywhere.”

As Hindu faithful in colorful saris and kurtas filed out the temple’s tinted glass doors, shouts of “Gloria a Dios!” drifted into the street from the whitewashed Iglesia de Dios Pentecostal next door.

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