Downtown robberies, graffiti bring crime talks to the fore
Barth’s Pharmacy has stood on East Main Street since 1917 -— and in nearly all that time, no one has robbed the store.
But that changed in the past three years, during which the business has twice been targeted by armed robbers. The most recent incident occurred Friday, when a masked man burst into the store, held a gun to an employee’s neck and took off with an unspecified amount of cash, said owner Barry Barth.
“Nobody was physically hurt and that’s a good thing, but the mental anguish and the fear of having someone coming to your place of business with a handgun to rob you is overwhelming,” Mr. Barth told the News-Review. “We just went through this two years ago. You try to put this behind you and then it rears its ugly head again.”
The brazen daytime robbery of Barth’s Pharmacy took place one day before a Riverhead High School student was arrested Saturday night for allegedly spray-painting gang symbols on the wall of a Riverhead business.
Then Tuesday night, a second armed robbery took place on Main Street, with Uncle Joe’s pizzeria being robbed at gunpoint by a man wearing a bandana over his face.
The high-profile incidents come as Riverhead residents and Town Board members wrestle with opinions about the Guardian Angels, a community watch group launched in the 1970s in New York City that has offered to patrol Riverhead’s streets starting later this month.
PICK UP THURSDAY’S COPY OF THE NEWS-REVIEW TO SEE WHAT LOCAL RESIDENTS THINK ABOUT THE GUARDIAN ANGELS COMING TO TOWN
Police Chief David Hegermiller has met with Guardian Angels leader Curtis Sliwa and both he and Town Supervisor Sean Walter approve of the group’s intervention. Meanwhile, although none of the Town Board’s four members have outwardly welcomed them, the Guardian Angels are expected to begin patrols and recruiting next week.
Police said the Barth’s Pharmacy robber entered the store around 2:45 p.m. Friday carrying a handgun and wearing a mask, a short-sleeved black T-shirt, dark-colored jeans and sneakers. Mr. Barth said police were at the store “instantly” after his employees reported the robbery, spending four hours to examine and document the scene.
While Mr. Barth is unfamiliar with the Guardian Angels, he said something needs to change downtown.
“I don’t know if you need patrols walking the sidewalk as a preventative,” he said. “It’s out of control. Suffolk County National Bank was just robbed recently. Now this. Very disturbing.”
One day after the Barth’s robbery, a 16-year-old boy was arrested in an unrelated incident after police spotted him making graffiti they linked to the gang MS-13.
Manuel Fuentes Lopez of Riverhead and an unknown man were painting the graffiti on the Elton Street business TrueTech shortly before 11 p.m. when officers in a police C.O.P.E. unit attempted to apprehend them. Police said both fled on foot, and Manuel was soon spotted and arrested on nearby Phillips Street. He was later released on $500 bail; the other suspect remains at large.
Three days later, the second robbery occurred.
• E-MAIL NEWSLETTER: Sign up, and have the news waiting in your inbox every morning
Employees at Uncle Joe’s said an unknown black male — described as 6-foot-2 with a black hooded jacket, dark colored pants and a bandana covering his face – entered the store about 8:15 p.m. Tuesday and pointed a handgun at an employee, demanding money. He then fled the area on foot.
Police declined to say how much cash the suspect made off with or if there was any connection to a robbery at neighboring Barth’s Drug Store Friday afternoon.
News of the robberies had downtown business owners concerned.
“I’ve been here 20 years and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Ken Loo, owner of the nearby Hy-Ting and Haiku restaurants as he walked by Uncle Joe’s about two hours after the reported robbery. “We’re all a little shaken.”
“We need more police downtown,” said Frank Spatola, who owns the building in which Uncle Joe’s is located. “People have to feel safe or Riverhead will never change.”
A manager at Uncle Joe’s declined to comment Wednesday morning.
The Guardian Angels would not have tracked down or arrested any of those suspects on the spot. Chief Hegermiller said he told Mr. Sliwa he doesn’t want the group to detain suspects until police arrive or try to make citizen’s arrests.
But the chief said he does want the Guardian Angels to be “eyes and ears in the street” and provide police with information. They could also to act as a conduit to the Spanish-speaking community, he said.
The police department has one officer — a recent hire — who is fluent in Spanish and about a dozen others who can speak some Spanish.
“It’s not a bad idea to have the Guardian Angels helping us with the Spanish-speaking community if they trust them more than they do us,” Chief Hegermiller said.
Mr. Walter did say on Wednesday that a seasonal increase in foot patrols downtown will be coming soon. “Up to seven” police officers will be deployed downtown from Memorial Day through Labor day — that’s compared with three officers the rest of the year, he said.
As far as how the Guardian Angels will work with those officers downtown, Mr. Walter said, “that’s a different issue.”
“They will have nothing to do with police work at all,” he said. “The whole purpose is to foster healthy relationships with the Hispanic and African-American communities.”
The supervisor said the volunteer group will ideally help build relationships between the town’s minority communities downtown and “superior officers” in the town’s police department.
READ MORE:
But Town Board members expressed skepticism about the Guardian Angels at last Wednesday’s meeting and, for the most part, that skepticism remained even after the graffiti incident and downtown robbery. They questioned whether the group’s presence is truly needed and whether it sends visitors the wrong message: that Riverhead isn’t a welcoming place.
Councilman George Gabrielsen said he still hasn’t gotten his questions answered and feels the town should do a background check on the group. He also feels the Town Board should have approval over whether to let the Guardian Angels patrol.
“You’re empowering them,” he said, adding that this could present liability issues for the town.
• Get the news to come to you: like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
While Councilman Jim Wooten and Councilwoman Jodi Giglio also remain opposed, Councilman John Dunleavy said, “We’ll have to see what happens.”
“I’m not going to say they’re no good,” he continued. “I’m going to say that any help we can get is better.”
Despite the crimes at Barth’s and TrueTech, Mr. Dunleavy said, “I really don’t think we have as much crime as everybody thinks we do.”
Ultimately, it may not matter if the board wants the Angels to come to town or not. They’re volunteers and the board can’t restrict them from organizing, Mr. Walter has said.
According to a News-Review analysis of Riverhead’s criminal statistics released last year, the number of crimes reported in 2013 (the most recent year for which figures are available) was actually the lowest it had been in a decade.
The most recent data, from 2014, has still not been made public. That data would have included a string of robberies and assaults that took place last year along Railroad Avenue, most of them targeting Hispanic men and homeless people.
The most recent publicly available crime data is in a monthly report from seven months ago.
Mr. Sliwa told the News-Review that the four Town Board members who expressed surprise last week that the Angels were planning to patrol Riverhead must have been in “hibernation” not to know about it.
“We’ve been talking about this on a regular basis,” Mr. Sliwa said. “I understand the nature of politics, where you say anything in the final days of a campaign. But unless they’re willing to go down and patrol the railroad station themselves, I don’t see what their alternative is — or if they even have an alternative.”
The Guardian Angels’ involvement on the North Fork began late last fall, when the group began patrolling Greenport after a gang-related shooting incident in Southold.
Despite this, Southold Town Police Chief Martin Flatley says he’s never seen them.
“In all honesty, I have read in the online media that they have conducted patrols, but I have not seen them or had any contact with the Guardian Angels,” he wrote in an email. “They never established a line of communication with our department to forward any information that they may have gathered from the community when they were formed. I have not heard of any interaction with our officers that patrol Greenport Village either, which is apparently where they conduct their patrols.”
Mr. Sliwa said the Guardian Angels have about 12 volunteers in Greenport and that they were recruited from the immigrant communities there.
According to Mr. Sliwa, they have “just about finished their training” at this point and are being led by a Greenport resident and native El Salvadoran named Gabriel Gonzalez, who lived in Riverhead for five years. Both Mr. Gonzalez and a supervisor sent from the Guardian Angels’ New York City office will “work hand in hand on Riverhead with the cooperation of the police.”
As far as the Angels’ lack of visibility in Greenport goes, Mr. Sliwa said, “The police are not necessarily cognizant of what’s going on because there’s a language barrier. Nearly all of our volunteers are bilingual.”
Unlike the police, Mr. Sliwa said, “we do what nobody else does, that I know of. We specifically go into the immigrant community and we try to empower them.”
The Guardian Angels have branches in 18 countries and 130 cities and not all of those locations want the group to have the same level of activity. Some just want them to report what they see, while others want them to intervene or even detain suspects until police arrive, Mr. Sliwa said.
“In Greenport, to this point, we have not had to detain anybody for arrests but we’ve broken up a lot of fights, disputes and arguments that might normally escalate into fights,” Mr. Sliwa said. “Generally, no one else is going to jump in and break up the fight otherwise.”