Helping America's Vets
There was a low-rent, uninteresting shooting in Cobble Hill around 6 a.m. Sunday. A 26-year-old man ran into two thugs with whom he had a passing familiarity. The early-rising ruffians allegedly demanded the man's necklace, but he refused to hand it over. The three of them then tussled briefly before the victim was shot in the chest. The assailants grabbed the necklace off his prone body and ran away. To read the newspaper accounts, the most noteworthy thing about the incident was not that someone got shot-he'll recover, after all-but rather that it took place near some really nice restaurants.
When 46-year-old Brooklynite George Lambert died unexpectedly at his home on Saturday, most everyone, including his wife, was surprised to discover that he hadn't been fiddling with a ham radio all these years after all. Lambert's private and super-top-secret workshop allegedly contained an AK-47, nine handgunsand various small explosives. Most interesting of all, it also contained a nearly completed pipe bomb, fashioned from a fire extinguisher.
We may never know for sure what he intended to do with all that weaponry, but there was some speculation that he planned to bring the bomb with him to the courthouse on Monday, where he was scheduled to be sentenced on some earlier charges. It struck us, though, that if you're being sentenced on weapons charges as it is, bringing a bomb along with you simply isn't going to help your case much.
Three 15-year-olds from Staten Island skipped school last Tuesday. To make up for what they'd be missing in class, they decided to brighten the life of one someone less fortunate residents. When they saw surly, legless Vietnam vet Francis Abrams sitting on the bus, they could tell he needed some cheering up. So one of the kids allegedly took a cigarette lighter and set fire to the knapsack on the back of Abrams' motorized wheelchair. That sure put some spring in his step!
As the bus driver pulled off to the side and Abrams started screaming, two passengers-one a new mother-leapt into action, dousing the flames with a bottle of breast milk. In the end, the bag was pretty much melted, but Abrams was unhurt. Unhurt, we might add, but with a newfound appreciation for the wondrous gift of life. Those three young Samaritans-now charged with arson, criminal mischief and reckless endangerment-can feel satisfied with a job well done.
As was inevitable in this era of surreptitious camera-phone photography, a woman walking near Lex and 88th on Tuesday discovered a multimedia camcorder strapped underneath a subway grating. Again inevitably, the lens was pointed straight up. Lots of folks are up in arms over this grotesque invasion of privacy (and private parts), and police are looking for a culprit. But we here at the Blotter would like to urge people to relax a little. A check of the device revealed that it hadn't worked. But even if it had, remember-those up-skirt shots are never worth a crap anyway. Always so blurry.