Police & Courts

A small plane crashed on the edge of Three Mile Harbor in East Hampton on Thursday at about 12:30 p.m., killing the pilot, Kent I. Feuerring of Sagaponack.

A Sept. 19 mattress fire at a house on Newtown Lane in East Hampton Village has led to two court summonses for its Florida homeowner, who is charged with failing to maintain proper fire-safety equipment.

Weighed down by discovery documents turned over to him by a Southampton assistant town attorney, the defense lawyer Edward Burke told The Star on Friday that his clients, Pamela and Peter Miller, are "beyond traumatized" following an Aug. 3 fire at their Spring Lane house in Noyac that left two sisters dead.

People see firefighters in their trucks, police officers writing tickets, and ambulances streaking by, but they don’t see the public safety dispatchers, who coordinate any emergency response in East Hampton Town and are also specially trained to give guidance over the phone on everything from CPR to childbirth to electrocution and even getting a car out of submerged water.

Police said they’d clocked a man driving 80 miles an hour in a 55-m.p.h. zone, and that he’d crossed the double yellow line “to pass numerous vehicles in an unsafe manner.” The car smelled like marijuana, they added, and the driver exhibited signs of “cannabis intoxication.”

A flurry of mid-September overnight car break-ins in Montauk, Amagansett, and Springs has had victims and residents taking to social media to bemoan an apparently organized racket and warn others about the incidents. Police say they’re on the case but have no suspects.

In arrests this week, one person was accused of stealing from the Inter Deli in East Hampton, another of criminal possession of fentanyl and driving while intoxicated, and third of sexual abuse.

A dog left alone in a Porsche prompted a wellness check on Sept. 20 after its owner went into John Papas Cafe to pick up a food order. Someone called police, who arrived and said the dog was fine.

Thieves hit a pop-up jewelry shop at Gurney’s Resort and Spa on Labor Day weekend. A woman grabbed a hat from a display, the shopowner told police, and tossed it to a friend seated on a couch nearby; the two then left the premises, hat in hand. The owner, Hayley Denman, said it was a cheap hat, but that not long after, one of the women had returned and dropped a $5,400 diamond butterfly necklace into her purse before fleeing. The women, who will be charged with grand larceny if found, were last seen getting into an Uber.

Jamal Johns of Newark is the latest defendant to accept a plea deal for his part in a March robbery at the East Hampton Balenciaga, when five people made off with $94,000 worth of handbags from the luxe Newtown Lane retail shop.

Local police made two drunken-driving arrests in the town last week and one in the village.

Daniel Campbell's sentencing hearing in the Amagansett hit-and-run case that led to the death of Devesh Samtani in August 2021 was pushed off to Nov. 3, and an attorney for the Samtani family believes the judge could rescind his no-jail offer.