By JOSEPH KELLARD
The most serious act at Cinelli¹s occurred about two months ago, when a delivery man was entering his own car in the restaurant parking lot and pellet gun shots rang out from a car at the corner of Oceanside Road and Davison Avenue, which took out his rear window.
On Halloween night, a group of young men jumped out of a car and threw dozens of eggs at a Cinelli¹s delivery man and his yellow delivery car, causing damage that Abballe paid thousands of dollars to repair. And before that, shortly after the restaurant opened in April 2005, custom-made lighted signs featuring the Cinelli¹s logo were ripped from atop four delivery cars and stolen, each at a cost of up to $800. The latest act, perpetrated about a month ago, involved teens captured on a Cinelli¹s surveillance camera overturning ornamental benches on the patio to use them as skateboard ramps.
³We watched it all on camera, and when they were done they smashed the benches and ran out,² Abballe said, adding that since these crimes were committed at night, distinguishing faces or auto license plate numbers is difficult.
Meanwhile, Al Argo, who has lived on Xavier Court behind the baseball fields at the rear of Oceanside High School for 35 years, said students and other young adults have always used a narrow area between the school property and his and other neighbors¹ backyards to drink and use drugs. But Argo believes matters have gotten worse in recent years.
³The police came back there just the other day, and the kids were cursing at them and using language I¹d never heard before,² Argo said. ³I mean, two girls were calling the cops pigs.²
Argo¹s neighbor, a resident of Xavier Place who asked to remain anonymous, said he often sees teens smoking pot, drinking beer, throwing and smashing the bottles and, more recently, attempting to or actually lighting fires in the area that is filled with reeds. ³The high school should just put a fence up,² he said.
OHS Principal Dorie Ciulla said the school already has a chain-link fence that borders the school grounds, and that the property where the teens loiter is not the school¹s jurisdiction. ³Thing are happening off campus, and they¹re happening after hours,² Ciulla claimed. ³And even though this area is not our campus, our security does monitor those areas during the day, on foot and in a vehicle.²
Ciulla said that when students are caught on that property during school hours, ³We always speak to them about being in that area.²
Once the warm weather arrives and school ends, teens tend to take their partying and vandalism to Oceanside Park, said some neighbors of the facility. Florence Devito of neighboring Carrel Boulevard said that kids threw a rock through the window of their daughter¹s home a few doors down from them. ³And she had a new baby whose crib was right under that window,² Devito said. ³Thank God she wasn¹t in the crib.²
Devito¹s daughter also had paint balls shot at her house, her car was scratched with a key and a window smashed out, and another neighbor experienced similar damage to his car. The Devitos claimed that these were examples of more blatant, consistent acts of vandalism their neighborhood experienced last summer.
³They were usually boys between 13 and 17 years old in the park or in their cars drinking beer and smoking pot, and they¹d walk around late at night terrorizing the neighborhood,² Devito said.
Policing the vandals
While the Devitos said they called the police ³and they do nothing,² Abballe said that in his case, ³The police have been absolutely fantastic in helping me deal with this situation.²
When asked about policing Oceanside Park, where officers last summer caught and ticketed a number of underage drinkers, Lt. Larry Feffer of the 4th Precinct said that once the warm weather rolls around, police will address this area more closely. ³It will be a targeted area now that the complaints have been voiced to us, and we¹ll handle it as best possible,² Feffer said after attending a town hall meeting hosted by the Town of Hempstead at Oceanside Middle School last week, where some of the victims of vandalism made their complaints.
Vandalism is a crime perpetrated mostly at random and for which police must largely be lucky or have good leads to nab the perpetrators, Feffer said. But when a particular location is a target, police employ specific methods, which he declined to disclose.
Feffer said that one deterrent to vandalism, or virtually any crime, is for police to have a regular presence so that potential vandals never know when there¹s going to be a police car in the area. Some residents argue that with Nassau County¹s cuts in police manpower and budget, such ³omnipresence² has suffered and thus invited criminality.
³We work with the resources we have and use it in the best possible manner,² Feffer said.
Feffer also encourages residents to get involved in the 4th Precinct¹s Community Watch program.
Comments about this story? JKellard@liherald.com or 516-569-4000 ext.287.
