Many other stories didn't make it into our first Year in Review in pictures, but deserve mention.
The Herald always seeks to report on people with unique achievement or whose efforts have made a difference in the community, and two of these people we profiled in 2005 were Oceanside High School student Andrew Titley and Island Park jeweler Max Saatchi. Titley started a book drive, Thai Books, in which he collected more than 60,000 donated textbooks and other volumes in English that, during his summer vacation, he delivered to some 15,000 students in schools in Thailand.
Saatchi, who left Iran after Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini established an Islamic fundamentalist regime in 1979, continued his tireless efforts to liberate his native country by joining a new organization, Americans for Democracy in the Middle East, and a rally of 20,000 strong outside the United Nations' Manhattan headquarters in September, protesting a speech by Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to the international body.
Alongside this good news, Oceanside and Island Park were not without tragedy in 2005. In April, both Oceanside and Island Park were the scenes of violent incidents that led to the murder of Tafare Berryman, 22, a varsity basketball player at LIU-C.W. Post. After a party held at the then La Mansion nightclub on Long Beach Road in Island Park, a fight broke out involving hundreds of party-goers, spilling out onto a nearby parking lot. Both Berryman and his friend, Aaron Daly, 19, were in the middle of the melee, in which bottles were broken and gunshots fired, and Daly suffered a serious cut to his face.
The two left the scene, and on their drive back to C.W. Post they stopped their vehicle to switch seats on Long Beach Road, near Henrietta Avenue in Oceanside, when a car pulled up next to them, shots were fired and a bullet struck and killed Berryman. In July, Nassau County police announced a $10,000 reward in the hope that it would help them catch Berryman's killer, but the case remains unsolved.
In August. Lauren Ludwig, 52, an assistant director at the Oceanside Counseling Center, was walking from her car in the School 6 parking lot to the OCC office in the building when she was caught and crushed between the front and rear tires of a Lull Hi-Loader that a driver was operating to move roofing materials. Ludwig was later pronounced dead at South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceanside.
On Halloween night, there were two separate incidents in which 15-year-old Oceanside boys were attacked and sent to SNCH. Drive-by shooters unloaded a BB gun on one boy, striking him in the face, ear and neck at the corner of Yorktown Street and Allen Avenue. In the other incident, at Long Beach Road and Mahland Place, a male suspect tossed an egg at a 15-year-old boy, got out of his car and punched him in the face. The victim suffered fractured bones around his eye socket and required surgery. A 19-year-old Oceanside man was later arrested for the assault.
Among the higher-profiled crimes in Oceanside was a home invasion on Xavier Place in August. Two male subjects entered the residence through a window in the wee hours of the morning, confronted a woman, woke her up and demanded cash. Her husband was injured after he fought off the burglars, who fled. Ernest Colon, 44, of Brooklyn was arrested in November and charged with first-degree burglary and first-degree attempted robbery. His arrest was the result of a joint task force that Nassau and Suffolk counties and New York City police formed in response to a series of residential burglaries in these areas in December 2004. Police believe Colon was part of a pattern of home invasions.
Meanwhile, high-profile trials connected to an Island Park murder ended in both a conviction and a mistrial. Robert Calabrese, 24, a Long Beach man who took bets for a bookie, was shot dead on Broadway, and police arrested and charged Mark Orlando, 34, of Bayshore and Herve Jeannot, 23, of Dear Park with the murder in December 2004. The prosecution charged that Orlando's motive was a multi-thousand-dollar sports gambling debt he owed to Calabrese, and that Orlando lured him to a quiet area on Broadway and held him down as Jeannot shot him. While Orlando was found guilty of second-degree murder in June, a jury deliberated for nearly 72 hours in September before a mistrial was declared in the case of Herve, who had been charged with first-degree murder. Jeannot's attorney argued that his client was a bystander, and that after a long interrogation he had given a false confession. A retrial is expected in 2006.
Among the good news reported in the Herald this year was the announcement by the Oceanside Friedberg JCC that it planned to open a day camp for children with cancer or cancer-related illnesses by the summer of 2006. Teachers and third-graders from Oceanside's School 9E shipped more than 30 boxes of items to American troops in Iraq, from toiletries to thank-you cards and letters, in December.
In addition to the March opening of a drive-through Starbucks on Austin Boulevard in Island Park, down the street at the Full Gospel Church, a coffeehouse started up, serving java and musical jam sessions. An alumnus from Oceanside High School, now an advertising writer in Manhattan, produced a beer commercial that aired during the Super Bowl, while students from his high school involved in a fledgling robotics program built "Skippy" the robot, and entered it in a statewide competition at Hofstra in June.
Among those we lost in 2005 whose lives were highlighted in the Herald were Fred Nickees, 96, a volunteer firefighter for the Oceanside Fire Department for 78 years, and Laborio "Stretch" D'Angelo, 79, a long-time member and ex-chief of the Island Park F.D. Peter O'Neill, an Oceanside photographer who was a well-recognized face around town, who died Jan. 30. Mike Demas, owner of Blossom Heath Florist in Oceanside, died at age 70, and Dan Schulman, a Vietnam veteran and past commander of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post in Oceanside, died at 57.
Enjoy our first-ever Year in Review in pictures -- and have a happy and healthy New Year.
