Bronx News Roundup, July 22

Sherr-una Booker says she'll refile charges against David Johnson, the former top aide to Gov. Paterson. Booker filed a police report last fall saying Johnson assaulted her in their Bronx apartment, but the case was dismissed when she missed a court appearance the day after getting a phone call from the governor.

Sam Suzuki, the slumlord who got prison time for ignoring court orders to repair his crumbling apartment building on E. 172nd Street, was released from jail this week but could be sent back by the courts as early as next week.

Funeral services were held yesterday for the two teens who drowned in the Bronx River last weekend. (See here for more on the incident, and its aftermath in the community).

A kitten named Motz was rescued from a sewer by city workers yesterday in Morris Park.

A new documentary called "The Lottery," tracks students from the Bronx and Harlem as they compete for a seat at the very competitive Success Academy charter school in the Harlem (Success Academy will open two schools in the Bronx this fall).

Roses at the Bronx Botanical Garden are being bred to resist insects, meaning some of the plants will be pesticides-free. 

AM New York says rats are making nests in MTA metro card machines. That's not the only foul thing that maintenance workers have to deal with--they say riders use the machines as personal urinals (the article calls out several Bronx stops along the D among the worst offenders).

Construction could be finally in the works for a towering, long-unfinished apartment complex on Oxford Avenue.

Bronx News Roundup, June 29

A group of Ghanaian immigrants now living in the Bronx are bringing a new musical sound to the borough with "hiplife"--a mix of hip hop and African music.

A group of students from the Ghetto Film School in Mott Haven are travelled to Belfast, Ireland to shoot their own horror movie. The school sends students to a different foreign country every year to film, according to this Daily News article.

Jamal Glover, a 32-year-old Bronx man, drowned in a creek while swimming with friends in upstate New York on Sunday night.

The Times' David Gonzalez profiles Ernest "Butch" Kelley, a neighborhood advocate who helped revive a park on Kelly Street in the South Bronx. Kelley passed away last month.

Real estate company Bluestone Group is coming to the rescue of distressed Bronx buildings, abandoned by landlords who defaulted on their mortgages, by buying the properties and fixing them up. The group is in talks to purchase a number of buildings owned by slumlord Sam Suzuki, who was given jail time last week for neglecting to repair a number of his apartments, even after several court orders.

A man was found shot to death this morning in the elevator of an apartment building on East 149th Street.

The Daily News' Bob Kappstatter has a ton of juicy Bronx political gossip in his weekly column. Some highlights? Former state Senator Efrain Gonzalez is finally heading to jail this week, and it looks like there's another contender for Michael Benjamin's assembly seat (we wrote about candidate Eric Stevenson in the last Tremont Tribune).

A groundbreaking ceremony is being held today at the site of Heritage Field, the park being built in the footprint of the old Yankee Stadium. Construction of the park should be done around fall of 2011 (critics have said the project, which was planned to make up for parkland destroyed by construction of the new stadium, has taken too long.)

An NYPD cop and Bronx resident was cleared of assault charges yesterday in a Manhattan court. David London was on trial for the beating of a man in the lobby of a Manhattan apartment building. The incident was caught on tape by surveillance cameras.

A group of animal lovers helped save a hawk that fell from its nest in Mott Haven this weekend.