By Hector Flores
On her street, Casey noticed a boy with a box of candy ringing the doorbell of a neighbor¹s house.
When there was no answer, the boy moved to another house, Kenny Forrester¹s, and rang the doorbell. Again no one answered, but this time the boy put his hand through the front door¹s mail slot, opened the door from the inside and entered the home. A couple of minutes later, Kaplan saw the boy leave the residence, walk down the block and turn the corner.
Within minutes, Forrester came down the street with his dog, Nate. Casey ran to her neighbor and told him that someone had been inside his home. Forrester went inside, and soon discovered that his wallet ‹ which he had left on the kitchen table ‹ was missing.
Without hesitating, Casey, who was wearing flip-flops, ran after the boy and caught up with him on Front Street, two blocks from her street. She confronted him and told him he had to return with her to Forrester¹s house and return the wallet. At first the boy refused, telling Casey he did not have it with him. He then admitted to dropping it in some shrubbery near Forrester¹s home. Casey demanded that he show her where the wallet was.
By the time she returned to Forrester¹s home with the boy, Forrester had called the police. The boy showed Casey and Forrester where he had dropped the wallet. Seven minutes later, police from the 1st Precinct arrived and took statements from Casey, Forrester and the boy, who turned out to be 13. Then the police led the boy away.
After hearing what had happened, Casey¹s mother, Peggy McQuade, a newly elected East Meadow Board of Education trustee, called her daughter a hero. ³My daughter is brave,² she said. ³This kid could have had a gun or something, but she did the right thing.²
McQuade added that her daughter is one of a kind and a tough cookie. In 2006, Casey was a catcher in the East Meadow Williamsport softball league. During the District 32 championship game, she was suffering from an infected tooth, but she refused to have it pulled until the championship series was over. ³She needed to have her tooth pulled,² her mother said. ³It was infected and her jaw was swollen, but she wouldn¹t let it be pulled. It was only after her team won the championship that she finally agreed to get the tooth pulled.²
Forrester, a longtime East Meadow resident, said that Casey had saved the day. ³I wasn¹t home and she saw the fellow go into my house and we were able to catch him,² he said. ³She is great and she¹s my pal, and she wasn¹t going to let this guy get away.²
Casey, however, said that she was actually a little scared about what happened. ³Usually our community is nice, and this kid [from out of town] made it scary for everyone,² she said. ³But when I got the guy, I wasn¹t thinking if he had a weapon or not. All I wanted to do was bring him back and get the wallet.²
She added that after this experience, she is considering a career in law enforcement. ³I would like to be a cop,² she said. ³I watch a lot of ³Law and Order S.V.U.,² and I would like to be a detective and work with kids.²
A new crime wave?
McQuade said that after the police took the boy into custody, a van appeared, and the driver tried to explain to police that the boy was only selling candy for a fund-raiser. ³The van had dropped him off,² McQuade said. ³And this isn¹t the first time I¹ve heard of vans dropping off kids to sell candy.²
She added that some of her neighbors have told her that they have seen kids selling candy in the parking lots of Pathmark and the Chase Manhattan Centre. ³Three or four neighbors have told me about this,² she said.
Helen Meittinis, president of the Community Association of Stewart Avenue, said that this is an ongoing problem. ³It is a scam,² she said. ³These vans come from all over and drop off young kids to sell things. They tell you they¹re fund-raising, but local kids are not permitted to go door to door. If the kid doesn¹t get money, they get nasty.²
Meittinis added that children are sometimes dropped off to case residents and their homes, and to see which homes have alarms. ³It has been going on for four years, but it has been going on much longer than that,² she said. ³They¹ll appear and then not show up for months, but now the incidents are getting closer and closer. It¹s no longer a year here and a year there ‹ now it¹s a couple of months.²
John Capece, deputy inspector commanding officer of the 1st Precinct, which takes in East Meadow south of Hempstead Turnpike, said that there is no crime wave in East Meadow, and the incident was one of two that he described as isolated events. ³The incident that occurred on June 30 on Jefferson Street resulted in the arrest of the 13-year-old boy, who lived outside of Nassau County,² Capece said. ³Earlier that day, our officers in East Meadow were on Evergreen and Belmont avenues and stopped some subjects who were going door to door. They had a Suffolk County peddler¹s license, but had nothing from the Town of Hempstead. The subjects were told that they couldn¹t solicit and were told to leave the area. After that we haven¹t had any reported cases of soliciting except for ... [Jefferson Street]. As far as we are concerned, we had that one arrest and the out-of-town incident, and before that, nothing.²
Capece¹s assurance that there is no door-to-door-solicitation crime wave was echoed by Robert Turk, inspector commanding officer of the 3rd Precinct, north of Hempstead Turnpike, including Salisbury. ³Solicitations have been going up from the homeless in Eisenhower Park,² Turk said. ³But there is definitely not a rash of panhandling. We have more problem with burglaries ... We¹ve had eight burglary arrests in a 30-day period. ... After the burglary arrests were made, the burglaries subsided.²
Turk explained that door-to-door solicitation is not allowed without a permit from the Town of Hempstead. ³We have stopped people in the area and questioned them and have issued them summonses for violating a town ordinance,² he said. ³Sometimes if someone is loitering in the area and they don¹t live near the area and have no good reason for being in the area, that is suspicious.
³We issue them an appearance ticket or check their identity to see if they have any outstanding warrants,² Turk continued. ³Or we catalog them, and if they appear again it will make our suspicions grow. ... Then they are in our system and we can see if they have been in an area where a crime occurred. It doesn¹t mean they did it, but it gives us a lead.²
Comments about this story? HFlores@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 283.
