Bronx News Roundup, May 10

Hope everyone had a great weekend! Now its time for some BX news!

A birthday party went sour early Sunday when two Bronx teens were killed on Weeks Avenue in Mt. Hope. A 20-year-old woman was also wounded and taken to St. Barnabas Hospital to be treated. The two alleged gunmen have been arrested.


President Obama has nominated Solicitor General Elena Kagan, another female New Yorker (after Bronxite Sonia Sotomayor), to take a seat on the Supreme Court.

Yesterday, firefighters ordered hundreds of tenants of a 29-story building in Melrose to evacuate the building due to an unstable chimney they thought would come crashing down. Tenants of the adjacent building were evacuated as well.

Part of the Solution (POTS.) Agency does more than just provide the poor and homeless with food and showers, they give them hair cuts too!

A look into what Assistant Chief Carlos Gonzalez, the NYPD's new Bronx Borough Commander is all about.

The "green" mixed-income affordable housing development, El Jardine de Selene, in Melrose is officially open. The LEED-Gold certification is still pending.

A Bronx man who was allegedly drunk, drove into nine pedestrians on Route 120 in New Jersey. Charges against him are yet to be determined.

According to a state senator, the number of sex offenders living in public housing projects in the Bronx has dropped, but not enough.

Congressman Jose E. Serrano Testifies for Sotomayor

In testimony during the Senate's confirmation hearings last week, the local congressman for the 16th District, Jose Serrano, praised the nomination of native Bronxite Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The hearings on Capitol Hill wrapped up last Thursday and it's widely assumed Sotomayor will be confirmed sometime in early August as a replacement for David Souter.

In his testimony Serrano chose to focus not on the accomplishments Sotomayor has made throughout her career as a New York City judge, but on the obstacles that are common to those people (like himself) who come from her kind of background.

"We come from rough neighborhoods," Serrano said inf ront of the Senate Judiciary Comittee. "We were surrounded by people making do on too little."

"Around us were many distractions that could have taken us down a totally different road," he went on, "but there was also ambition and people determined to make something of themselves."

His testimony lifted Sotomayor up to be reveled not for the work she has done in her time as a judge, but for what Serrano says, are the values of "hard work and looking out for one another" that are prevalent for someone growing up less fortunate in the Bronx.

"Everyone watching this nomination should know that based upon her background and ideals, they are in good hands with Judge Sotomayor," he said.