Slain New York City Police Detectives Honored with Boat
AP
A 36-foot police boat now bears the names of two slain detectives.
A dedication ceremony was scheduled Monday for the Nemorin Andrews.
NYPD Detectives James Nemorin and Rodney Andrews were killed in an undercover gun buy-and-bust operation in 2003.
Broadway star once slept in Washington Square Park – until cop gave her a break
Rosier/News Terri White with Officer David Taylor, near spot in park where he spotted homeless star and helped her turn her life around.
When Broadway star Terri White performs her show-stopper “Necessity” every night in “Finian’s Rainbow,” she knows what she’s singing about.
A year ago, she was homeless and sleeping on a bench in Washington Square Park – and, but for a beat cop who cared, she might still be there.
White, who sings out lines like “the landlord says the rent ain’t paid” in front of 1,700 people at the St. James Theatre, couldn’t share her troubles with Liza Minnelli, for whom she has sung backup at Radio City Music Hall.
She couldn’t tell Glenn Close or Jim Dale, her co-stars in “Barnum,” or even her friends at the piano bars in Greenwich Village.
Some of those bars have closed, like Eighty-Eights and Rose’s Turn. Most of the others just ain’t what they used to be.
“People wanted ‘American Idol,’ ” White, 61, says. “They wanted ’80s pop. My stuff is musical theater, torch songs . . . you tell a story. I don’t do vocal trickery.”
No. No ego fireworks here. Just eruptions from a great soul, in powerful, raspy bursts that tell you this lady knows the blues.
Things got really bad last year. White couldn’t pay the bills. Her partner of 14 years threw her out. She couldn’t get a gig.
“I can’t tell you how many times I auditioned,” White says. “Chicago” rejected her eight times.
“I was depressed, and it zapped my positive energy, and I think they felt that,” White explains. “I thought I was over.”
She was on the street. Guys who’d bummed smokes off her outside the clubs watched out for her. Still, it was dangerous.
She would catnap on a Washington Square Park bench for an hour, then wander the narrow streets of the Village for another.
On one of those walks down Grove St., she bumped into 6th Precinct cop David Taylor.
“I was on patrol at around 4 in the morning. It was early fall, and it was chilly,” Taylor says.
“I was coming up Grove and I saw her coming down Seventh Ave. South. She came over to the car.”
They’d seen each other around the neighborhood for a couple of years.
“I first met Terri in 2006 when I was on foot patrol. She was immediately friendly and called out, ‘Hello, Officer! Thank you for protecting the Village!’
“I’d pop in to the clubs. She has a really booming, powerful voice. She was always smiling and happy.”
That’s how Taylor knew something was very wrong. “That life force which had always been inside her was gone,” he recalls.
White opened up to him in a way she couldn’t to Liza.
“Speaking softly, she told me she was homeless. It caused a little bit of panic in me, because the park had a lot of drug dealers.”
She’d been on the streets three months. Rather than refer her to a shelter and drive on, Taylor, started calling in some chits.
“I started texting immediately. I had just helped this guy move stuff out of a basement apartment. I asked him if Terri could use a room until she got on her feet. He said okay.”
His action set off others, like one magnet clicking to the next.
White started to get her old self back. The owner of The Keys club in Key West, Fla., flew her down to sing for a weekend. It turned into a two-week gig.
She met jewelry designer Donna Barnett. When auditions began for the Encore’s version of “Finian’s Rainbow,” Barnett paid for her to fly to New York.
She got it! Producer Alan Marks heard her sing and hired her for the Broadway show.
Now there’s Tony buzz. People magazine. TV. Then White and Barnett fell in love, and two weeks ago they exchanged rings on the St. James stage with White’s never-give-up motto of perseverance: “Just Go!”
Taylor, who has the giant kind of soul that makes New York great, was there, beaming.
How’s that for a happy ending?
By Joanna Molloy
Indiana State trooper runs to help fight cancer
- By Adam Hall
WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI) – Trooper Joel Flores ran up and down hills, against the wind, all the way from Crawfordsville to West Lafayette to raise awareness and money for cancer.
Flores knows the physical and mental toughness needed to run a 26.2 mile marathon. He’s run marathons in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Ireland, but he said this 33-mile run is the longest and most meaningful run of his life. 
“This was a whole different experience. The marathons were all just personal…me, myself, and I,” said Flores.
This time Flores was running for two people. J.D. Taylor, the 13-year-old son of a Crawfordsville Police Officer, who passed away last month from cancer, and for Reagen Dillman, daughter of a fellow state trooper who recently began her battle with the disease. Flores said when times got tough during the run J.D. and Reagen kept him going.
“I felt the kids with me the whole time. I had a lot of guys running with me today and anytime there was a full moment or a point when somebody wasn’t talking I was thinking about the kids,” said Flores.
Flores said he sympathizes with the families he is running for and knows how it feels to be impacted by cancer.
“I lost my mother to cancer and that was tough, but losing a child…I have a little boy and one on the way and I don’t want to ever think about it,” said Flores.
Other runners joined Flores at different stretches. He said their support help push him along.
“I broke it up as much as I possibly could. Once I got to Linden, or once I got to Romney, or once I got to the levy. 10 miles here, 5 miles there, 3 miles here. Honestly the longest stretch was when I got to I-65 and saw the tower to the post…and was like “That tower is a long way away,” said Flores.
When he arrived the Indiana State Police Post he was greeted with cheers, followed by hugs, and tears. Indiana State Trooper Sean Swaim is the father of Reagen Dillman He ran alongside Flores during the last stretch.
“There’s all types of emotions. There’s overwhelming emotions. People go by honking their horns and yelling out the window showing support. Joel had the pictures on his back. You see the two pictures there and it brings tear-jerking emotions and then you feel some pain,” said Swaim.
Sue and Jack Taylor are the parents of J.D. Taylor. Both were overcome by emotion when Flores finished.
“One of the first things he said to me was “I could feel J.D. with me” and that means so much to us. We miss him terribly and it’s incredible that someone would want to do this. It was just such a hard fight and J.D. was a fighter ever since 2005 when we fought this and for him to want to do this to honor J.D. touched us in a special way,” said Sue Taylor.
Trooper Flores said just because his run is over doesn’t mean donations should stop coming in. Those who are interested in helping the families can donate to the Indiana Troopers Association Youth Fund.
Half of the donations and pledges will go to St. Vincent Hospital in Indianapolis in memory of J.D. Taylor. The other half will go towards Reagen’s family to help with medical expenses.
LINK
Boy Quick to Make ‘Arrest’ as Riverside Police Officer For Day
Dateline: Riverside, CA
The Press-Enterprise
David Bauman / The Press-Enterprise Joseph Richardson, 8, is lifted into the front seat of a Riverside Police Department helicopter by Officer Adrian Tillett on Thursday. The Riverside youth, who suffers from a life-threatening heart condition, got to be a police officer for the day through the Make-A-Wish Foundation.
Joseph Richardson didn’t wait until he was sworn in to find his first arrest.
The moment the 8-year-old boy was fitted with a custom Riverside police uniform shirt and miniature duty belt, he channeled an officer’s quick instincts.
Assistant Chief John De La Rosa waited to read him his oath Thursday morning. But Joseph couldn’t ignore the commotion in the front row.
There were his brothers, playing the role of rabble-rousing suspects. Without a word, Joseph moved in, keeping 13-year-old Michael at bay while calmly placing 6-year-old Joshua’s hands behind his back as he lowered him to his knees.
That would have to do. Joseph hadn’t yet received his plastic handcuffs.
“He’s ready to go out on patrol,” said Riverside police Sgt. Jaybee Brennan, as a room of onlookers smiled and “awwed.”
For Joseph and his family, the officer-for-a-day festivities were a bright spot in an ongoing health battle.
Adopted from Estonia with fetal alcohol syndrome and multiple heart disorders — including pulmonary hypertension and transposition of the aorta and pulmonary artery — Joseph has the cognitive skills of a 2-year-old and faces his fourth open-heart surgery Monday.
Working with the Make-A-Wish Foundation of Orange County and the Inland Empire, Riverside police helped Joseph realize his biggest dream.
“He goes around making car noises, saying ‘I want to arrest the bad guy’ and the whole nine yards,” said his father, Scott Richardson. “He just started with ‘I want to be a police officer,’ and it never stopped.”
The buzz-cut, bespectacled boy would visit communications headquarters (where he introduced himself to dispatchers as “Officer Joseph”), receive a bagful of toy SWAT gear, play with Rocco, the department’s K9 dog, and be pinned with four stars on his collar.
“He outranks me,” said Officer Adrian Tillett, one of the personnel and training staff who helped plan the day. “We should salute him.”
But the highlight for Joseph, at least based on the enthusiasm in which he undertook the effort, was surely his arrest of a wanted bank robber. He took a flier for the “Paul Bunyan Bandit” — actually Detective Pat Young — and rode shotgun in a pursuing patrol car.
Just outside the department’s Central Avenue hangar facility, he found the imposingly tall “suspect.” He made an announcement over the car’s loudspeaker, “Stop! We’re going to arrest you,” and placed him in the plastic cuffs.
As the day continued, and Joseph got to see the inside of a police helicopter and look through the scope of an MP-5 machine pistol, he wondered where the suspect had gone. The sign of a true investigator: wanting to see a case all the way through.
“He is going to be set,” his mother, Jennifer Richardson, said at one point, watching Joseph switch between his plastic baton, walkie-talkie and SWAT helmet. “He is going to be playing police officer for the next 20 years.”
