Police & Courts

A rare contested fire district election in Montauk saw record voter turnout on Tuesday. An incumbent commissioner was re-elected for a second five-year term by a margin of 25 votes.

Whatever happened to that late-June incident at the Goop shop in Sag Harbor, where two waiters were badly burned after a store employee toasted marshmallows for an event, using isopropyl alcohol?

A 20-year-old man who has reportedly been sleeping in the vestibule at 105 Newtown Lane, a commercial-residential building, was threatened with arrest for trespassing on Dec. 8 if he continued to sleep there. Police told him to leave, and he gathered his possessions and went out into a bitter winter evening.

On the night of Dec. 5, a homeless 67-year-old man in a wheelchair donned a Santa hat and tried to get into the Point Bar and Grill in Montauk. According to East Hampton Town police, he was refused service after he “created a disturbance” and was “very intoxicated.”

Sag Harbor police clocked a New York City man doing 41 miles an hour in a 20 m.p.h. zone on Dec. 7, and presented him with a speeding ticket. He then jumped out of the car, police said, refused to get back in it, and deposited the ticket on the police car before driving away.

The race for a seat on Montauk Fire District's board of commissioners is contested this year, with two experienced first responders facing off for a five-year term. Voting is Tuesday from 2 to 9 p.m. at the Fire Department headquarters on Flamingo Avenue. All registered voters in Montauk are eligible to cast ballots; the commissioner's election is not limited to fire department members.

After crashing a Mini Cooper into a Kia minivan, the driver of the Mini Cooper ran away, according to East Hampton Town police.

Annual fire district elections, in which voters select commissioners to oversee finances, personnel, and other administrative aspects of volunteer fire department services, will take place Tuesday in Bridgehampton, Montauk, Amagansett, and Springs.

A windsurfer was reported in distress off Long Beach on a windy and rainy Saturday afternoon, but while a multiagency response including Southampton, Sag Harbor, and East Hampton police was being organized, the windsurfer got to shore and said there had never been a problem.

In what Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney described as "meticulously planned heists," a pair of thieves allegedly targeted a wealthy woman with residences in Sag Harbor and Manhattan and made off with cash, art, guns, jewelry, fine wines, and other items valued at more than $1 million.

A 14-year-old girl suffered a laceration to her head on Friday when she was hit by a three-foot section of hollow metal tubing thrown by a juvenile from the top of the radar tower at Camp Hero in Montauk.

A group of young women, possibly juveniles, stole eight bottles of Fireball Whiskey, worth $36.72, from the Gulf gas station on Hampton Street in Sag Harbor Saturday night.

A New York State judge has dismissed a lawsuit against NYCO Chemists III, which does business in East Hampton as White’s Apothecary, in which the pharmacy had been accused of overfilling prescriptions for opioid painkillers.

A body that washed up on the beach at the Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island on Nov. 8 has been identified by the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office as Dario Cholula. 

Sag Harbor Village on Sunday night police charged a driver — who was injured when he crashed his car into a telephone pole — with drunken driving.

Lawyers for the family of two young women killed in a Noyac rental-home fire this summer have taken their case to federal court.

A Westhampton Beach woman attended a fund-raiser at Gurney’s Friday night, and won a white vase and three pillows. Afterward, she asked a bellhop to put the items in her car, and he set the vase on a bench near the valet booth while retrieving a cart to ferry her belongings to her car. When the bellhop returned, the vase was gone. On Saturday, a member of Gurney’s staff returned it. 

Jamal Johns, one of five people who participated in a March robbery at the luxe retailer Balenciaga’s East Hampton shop, was sentenced on Friday to three and a half to five years in prison, Suffolk County District Attorney Raymond A. Tierney has announced.

East Hampton Town police reported a single alcohol-related arrest on local roads last week.

A body was found washed up on the beach at the Mashomack Preserve on Shelter Island on Friday but has yet to be identified by the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office.

A Springs woman called police for the second time in two weeks on Nov. 4 to say she had found a dead swan near her house. Police reported that the carcass was intact and appeared undamaged, but that its head was missing.

A livery driver hired for an early morning airport run caught the air meant for his yet to be picked up passengers Wednesday when he fell asleep and drove into the Hedges Inn. “He knocked the whole house off its foundation,” said the keeper of the inn, which is closed for the season.

A Montauk man was charged with manacing after he allegedly grabbed “an orange-handled sword” and lunged at another person during a verbal altercation.

Police find themselves all too often in the role of social workers. The Flying Point Foundation for Autism is working to help them navigate this role when it comes to dealing with children and adults on the autism spectrum, because, as its founder said, a “minor emergency involving” someone on the spectrum “could go off the rails in a heartbeat.”

Four people entered London Jewelers on Nov. 2, two of whom said they wanted to buy a watch. They picked one out, then showed a manager a picture of a credit card on a phone and said they’d pay for the watch that way. When the manager asked for a physical copy of the credit card, the would-be buyers couldn’t produce it. The four left the store; the watch stayed behind. The manager wanted the incident documented.

It’s a career route that around 20 percent of veterans have taken when their military service is up: Join a municipal police force and transition from overseas warrior to domestic peacekeeper, and on the East Hampton Town police force there are several former active service members.

A woman was crossing Old Fireplace Road near Fireplace Road in Springs last Thursday when a vehicle struck her from behind and left the scene.

“I am truly sorry for ruining your lives,” a tearful Daniel Campbell, the driver in an August 2021 hit-and-run that led to the death of Devesh Samtani, told a courtroom full of Mr. Samtani's friends and family at his sentencing hearing on Thursday. "The loss of your son’s life will be with me forever.”

On Oct. 25, April Gornik and her husband were walking along Route 114 on North Haven when she was struck from behind, on her shoulder, by the passenger-side mirror of a pickup truck, which then sped by. The accident has renewed calls to lower the speed limit on that stretch of the road.

A Harbor View Drive resident told police on Sunday that a drunken man had been banging on his door at 3 that morning. At 3:08 a.m., a neighbor called as well, saying there was a drunk on his front lawn who kept approaching his front door. Officers escorted the man home.