After shooting, Paterson officials won't talk to Mike Kelly

Traffic was tied into knots today at Main Street and Center Avenue in Fort Lee, where noisy utility work is driving people who live and work in the neighborhood crazy. Police positioned a patrol car to funnel motorists into a single Center Avenue lane. The engine was running, but the only occupant was a large teddy bear in the back seat.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Even the great Mike Kelly couldn't get Paterson Mayor Joey Torres and Police Director Jerry Speziale to comment on the apparent drive-by shooting that killed Nazareh Bugg, 14, a high school freshman, as she walked to a takeout restaurant.

Kelly's musings on breaking news usually appear on Page 1, but today, The Record leads the Local front with his column, including a factual error in the second sentence (L-1).

"On another patch of cracked Paterson sidewalk, where another teenage girl had been murdered in another drive-by shooting, the mothers gathered on Monday," Kelly reports.

Genesis and Nazareh

Putting aside that Kelly has been churning out crap like this for more than 20 years, Genesis Rincon was only 12 when she was killed on July 5; she wasn't, as Kelly says, a "teenage girl."

The follow-up to Nazareh's shooting appears on Page 1 today, and an editorial is on A-10, but neither raises the question of what a 14-old-girl was doing on Paterson's violent streets a few minutes before midnight on Saturday.

Nor does Kelly take any notice. He's too busy documenting "cracked sidewalks" in Paterson.

And The Record just can't bring itself to call Torres and Speziale a pair of official disgraces for allowing the cold-blooded murder of another innocent minority young girl so soon after the first. 

Paper is last again

A short story on Governor Christie losing 85 pounds since having lap-band surgery in February 2013 is from The Philadelphia Inquirer, which, in turn, quotes The New York Times (A-6).

Unfortunately, anyone who lives in New Jersey and isn't a multimillionaire like Publisher Stephen A. Borg are big losers, too, since Christie took office in 2010.

Taxing hospital

Staff Writer Lindy Washburn again fails to report a big reason  for Hackensack University Medical Center's financial health.

HUMC rang up $1.4 billion in annual revenue (L-1), but as "a non-profit," it pays no taxes on more than $180 million in property it owns in Hackensack.

That gives city residents big headaches.

Two other big tax-exempt entities in the city are Bergen County and Fairleigh Dickinson University.

Meanwhile, the Costco Wholesale in Hackensack will remain open after a new warehouse store is completed in Teterboro in November 2015, meaning no loss in property taxes to the hard-pressed city. 

See:

Good and bad news at Hackensack Costco Wholesale

Causes of death?

Local obituaries usually list a cause of death, but that information is missing in two of them today (L-6).

And Arthur "Bub" Tramontin, who died at 94, is called "part of a two-wheel dynasty," but a photo shows him sitting on a motorcycle with three wheels.