"It is possible the Hummer technically had the light but basically was blowing through the intersection timing the light. The driver did not even stop after they hit her. Not sure if any witnesses might have gotten a license plate or, since it is a unique car/unique color, if someone knows the owner of the car."
"She is home now and honestly it's a miracle she is alive. She suffered a very serious leg injury that required a bunch of stuff that night and the next day and will again require surgery down the road."
It was reported to police that on Saturday, October 26, 2019 at approximately 1225 hours, in front of 26 Avenue C, a 35-year-old male victim was walking when two individuals approached him and engaged him in conversation. The two individuals were soon joined by two additional individuals, who then all took turns punching the male victim until he fell to the ground.
The group of four individuals then continued to punch and kick the victim about the head and upper torso, before forcibly removing his property, consisting of his jacket, boots, sunglasses and $1 cash. The victim sustained lacerations and bruising to his head and torso and was treated and subsequently released from Bellevue Hospital.
The individuals are described as three adult females and one adult male, 20s- 30s; the three females have heavy builds, two of them carrying handbags, while the male has a medium build, facial hair and a full head of black hair. The individuals were acting in concert.
With so many treating Halloween as nothing more meaningful than an excuse to party till dawn in a half-assed superhero costume, it’s safe to say the holiday has drifted far from its historical roots.
Nevertheless, by virtue of its relationship to various traditions honoring the dead – as well as to ancient festivals marking the onset of the “darker half” of the year, a transitional moment when the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead were thought to become porous – Halloween also conjures up images of the underworld, and by association, notions of Satan, witchcraft, and other dark forces.
Her name was Susan Leelike, and she was a city and neighborhood treasure. She was born in 1938, into a very different New York City, to parents of Russian Jewish extraction. Both of her parents were Communists, and she was a true Red Diaper baby who lived for the vast majority of her 81 years in either the West or the East Villages, the last 50 of them on our side of the island.
She co-founded GOLES (Good Old Lower East Side) in 1977 with her friend Floyd Feldman, with the objectives of providing tenant advocacy and shining an early spotlight on neighborhood preservation.
Among other thing, they envisioned the transformation of an underutilized Department of Sanitation facility, in one of Mayor LaGuardia's old former city markets, as a perfect spot for a theater; without their creativity and tireless efforts, Theater for the New City would not today be calling East 10th Street and First Avenue home.
In the 1990s, Susan and her neighbors on 10th Street between First Avenue and Second Avenue took on the 24/7 drug dealers that infested so many streets of the East Village back then and won; this on top of helping to gut-rehab an abandoned, fire-ravaged tenement building that she had called home since 1982.
Now a fully-functioning HDFC, it survived and thrived in no small part to her unceasing labors, and the success of her undertakings helped to turn that block into the destination hotspot that it is today.
She was a founding member of the Democratic Action Club, formed to take on and eradicate the issue of the homeless encampment in Tompkins Square Park, another city-ignored situation which turned one of the only green areas in the neighborhood into a filthy, drug-ridden haven for the homeless, while putting it off-limits to neighborhood residents.
Anyone who utilizes the park today — its playgrounds, asphalt, dog run or lawns – can thank, among many others, Susan. She tried to fight for the preservation and renovation of the now-closed-and-awaiting-demolition Essex Street Market, one of only two instances I can recall of a battle in which she was vanquished.
I called her the East Village Jane Jacobs — her love of New York and its historical significance, her knowledge of the neighborhood and its architectural and personal history, her memories of the things that used to be here that have vanished in the mists of time, were encyclopedic, and the loss of the memories she carried in her head is incalculable.
She labored in obscurity and has passed into the shadows with no fanfare save for that given to her by those of us who loved her, her sense of humor, her stubbornness, her sharp laugh, her crankiness, her belief that a city's history and the everyday people who made it mattered, and above all her fierceness in fighting for the things she believed were right, deeply.
Susan was my friend for 30 years, and on Oct. 26, I was holding her hand as she lost that second battle, surrounded by the family and friends who cherished her, and whom she loved so much in return.
Her passing has ripped another hole in the every-evolving quilt that makes up New York; while to some it may seem tiny, to those of us who knew, put up with and adored her, it is a massive, gaping one that will never be filled. There aren't many like her left today, and we have just lost one of the good ones.
