Members of the press, cameras at the ready, lingered at the entrance to Town Justice Court just before 11 a.m. on Sept. 3, hoping to capture the arrival of Gail Bomze, the 75-year-old real estate agent accused of biting a 7-year-old girl during a T-shirt toss on East Hampton’s Main Beach last month.
The incident occurred on the evening of Aug. 12 during a free concert organized by the East Hampton Village Foundation as part of its Tuesdays at Main Beach summer music series, which, says the foundation’s website, draws between 2,000 and 5,000 patrons to the beach each time. Rubix Kube, an ’80s tribute band, performed that night.
At around 7:30 p.m., police were called to the beach, where the girl’s parents reported that a woman with long brown hair, wearing a dark green dress, had been “kicking and punching kids” while trying to catch a T-shirt that was being tossed from a balcony. The woman grabbed their daughter’s right arm and “bit it,” the parents said, breaking the skin and causing the arm to bleed and swell.
Officers did not find anyone matching the description during a search of the beach that night, but later learned that another concert guest had taken a photo of the woman and sent it to the chief lifeguard, and that someone else had recognized her as “a woman named Gail.” A village detective then obtained surveillance footage from the Main Beach Pavilion cameras, which had captured the incident, and was able to confirm the woman’s identity.
Officers arrested Ms. Bomze on the afternoon of Aug. 19, charging her with assault in the third degree and endangering the welfare of a child, both misdemeanors, and took her to village headquarters for processing. She was released with an order to appear in Justice Court for arraignment.
Justice Steven Tekulsky called for a 10-minute recess before the case was called, and warned reporters that if they left the courtroom after proceedings resumed they would not be permitted to re-enter.
Ms. Bomze entered the courtroom after the recess, dressed in black and holding tightly to the arm of a younger woman for support. Both women wore dark-colored baseball caps and sunglasses, which the judge immediately ordered them to remove, and they took seats in the second row.
The case was called at 11:30 a.m. Ms. Bomze seemed to have difficulty walking as she approached the bench. She swayed slightly, reaching out to steady herself a few times, as Luigi Belcastro, her defense attorney, entered pleas of not guilty to both charges.
Assistant Suffolk County District Attorney Christen Heine, the prosecutor, requested a stay-away order of protection for the 7-year-old, which Justice Tekulsky granted, after confirming with Mr. Belcastro that his client did not know the child. The court then advised Ms. Bomze that though they were strangers, she should “cross the street” to maintain her distance if she happened to see the minor somewhere.
Mr. Belcastro did not respond to a request for comment last week. On the day after the arrest, his colleague Christopher McGuire, the senior partner at the Riverhead firm McGuire, Pelåez, Bennett & Belcastro, had told The New York Post’s Page Six that “Ms. Bomze is a 75-year-old grandmother who categorically denies these allegations.”
Ms. Bomze, he said, had been “knocked to the ground in the chaos” of the T-shirt toss by a group of teenagers, leaving her “sore and injured,” and that she had written to the event’s organizers the next day to express safety concerns.
“The organizers promptly called her, apologized, and assured her that changes would be made,” Mr. McGuire continued, adding that she had also met with local police to “raise her own concerns” and request an investigation into the incident. “This unfortunate episode could have been avoided with better event management and appropriate crowd control measures in place,” the lawyer concluded.
During last week’s arraignment, Ms. Heine told the court that the district attorney’s office was not prepared to make any sort of plea-bargain offer at this time, as it is still investigating the incident. In response, Justice Tekulsky set an attorneys-only appearance for the case at 9 a.m. on Oct. 16.