The recent opening of Lucki Clover, above, in a Broad Street space vacated last September, is seen as one of many indicators of a strengthening comeback.  (Click to enlarge)

By JOHN T. WARD

Without question, the losses have been significant.

Over the past six months, as the global, national and regional economies have struggled to emerge from the wreckage of the 2008 credit meltdown, Red Bank’s retail market has continued to absorb hard-to-shake-off business departures.

Primas Home Cafe. Willy’s Cheesesteaks. Soapmarket. Later this month, Surray Luggage, a Broad Street fixture, will hold a liquidation sale.

But more so than in the recent past, the downtown real estate market has been marked by two noteworthy trends: faster refilling of storefronts, and the end of several key, longtime vacancies.

What’s it all add up to? In a word, recovery, says at least one downtown Churn watcher.

Among new stores yet to open is Femme By Ashley, a lingerie and swimwear shop owned by Ashley Dupré. (Click to enlarge)

Jay Herman, a principal in Downtown Investors, which owns a dozen properties in the district, tells redbankgreen that demand is “absolutely” on the upswing. He attributes that to the end of a national bottoming-out, and to the interplay of five local elements: retail, restaurant, residential, office an entertainment.

“The downtown is leading the way,” said Herman, who recently broke ground on an expansion for tenant Morgan Stanley on Linden Place, just steps from Broad Street. “We are finding more success than is true nationally.”

Or regionally, for that matter. Herman says anyone driving Route 35 from Hazlet to Brielle and looking at the shopping centers “will find that the success in filling vacancies is not what is in downtown Red Bank.”

Here’s a lookback at some of the key activity in Red Bank’s main business district over the past six months.

• Print shop AlphaGraphics moved to 68 White Street, former home of Cigars Plus, and quickly saw the space it vacated in the City Centre Plaza, at Maple Avenue and West Front Street, leased to Yo Mon Yogurt, a self-serve frozen yogurt business owned by Michael and Jennifer Mann of Little Silver. AlphaGraphics is open for business and Yo Mon is under construction.

• David Banegas, an action painter who already had a gallery in Delray Beach, Florida, opened a new gallery/live-painting studio into the space vacated five months earlier by clothing store Bella Mystique, at 43 Broad Street.

• Nina’s Waffles & Sweets opened at 15 White Street, in a space recently vacated by Filakia Children’s Boutique.

Yestercades, a retro electronic gaming parlor, opened at 80 Broad Street, filling a giant, gaping hole that had defied filling since the failure, in 2007, of f LJ’s Total Man/Today’s Woman clothing store.

• Barefoot Bride, a gown shop that had called Fair Haven home for more than 45 years, moved to the 2,000-square-foot storefront at 65 Monmouth Street, former home Rob Amend and Michael Yavorsky’s of Red Ginger Home furnishings, which relocated to Broad Street more than a year ago.

• LoBoudoir Photography, which offers the latest in must-have hubba-hubba personal imagery, joined its sibling CLB Photography and Mike Hernandez Jr.’s Sounds to Go DJ service to take over the storefront at 21 East Front Street, a glass-fronted space last tenanted by the chic furniture seller Design Front, which left in 2009.

• Two dress shops moved in days apart, and one storefront apart, on Monmouth Street in November.

Jessy Krol’s Emilia took over 28 Monmouth, vacated in early August by Cocoon, an accessories retailer. Then,  Rue Royale Couture, specializing in prom and pageantwear, took over at 24 Monmouth, formerly held by Polish tableware dealer Adams Imports.

In between those two was David Levine Salon, which relocated to 69 Monmouth, former home of Cheveux Salon, leaving a yet-to-be filled vacancy at 26 Monmouth.

• Also on Monmouth, in the shop that formerly housed Miss Sherri’s Honey Child Music, Josephine More opened Innovative Nails.

• Kravings Frozen Yogurt opened at 90 Broad, filling another of the downtown’s most persistent vacancies.

Remember Altamonte Imports? Yeah, neither does Google. That was the last tenant in the space. Kravings owner Jill Pecoraro, bouncing back from the failure of another fro-yo franchisor with which she had contracted, shifted gears to create the new brand and outfit the gleaming, green-tiled space, which debuted in February.

• Kramer Portraits, which for the past 10 years had occupied a narrow storefront next door to the Jade Garden take-out Chinese place on Broad Street, took one of the two storefronts at 8 East Front last month. That’s the former Kislin’s Sporting Goods building, which vacated in 2005 and had no successor tenants.

As reported by Retail Churn last week, Vizzini & Company, a furniture dealer, plans to leave its anchor space in the Galleria at Red Bank on the West Side to take the second of the two storefronts, ending the building’s seven-year drought.

• Hair stylist Salon Concrete has signed to take over half the space at the 5,600-square foot 123-127 Broad Street, said salon owner Christine Zilinski. For years, the building was home to Surray Luggage, which moved to the opposite side of Broad several years ago.

• In news that broke on redbankgreen and gained national coverage, Ashley Dupré, whose infamous romps with Eliot Spitzer torpedoed his career as New York’s governor, plans to open a lingerie and swimwear store called Femme by Ashley at 15 Broad Street, a stylish storefront recently vacated by children’s boutique Lavish Kids. Outfitting of the store is underway, with an eye toward a May opening, we’re told.

• Jr’s West End, the Long Branch late-night hamburger and sandwich restaurant launched five years ago, plans to expand into the former home of Zuleyka’s Kitchen at 17 West Front Street.

• After five months of downtime, popular Red Bank coffee mainstay Zebu Forno reopened at a new address on March 1: 12 Broad Street  just a few doors down from the storefront it occupied for a decade at 20 Broad.

• Jonathan Erdelyi, a 30-year-old national racing champion, rolled out Red Bicycle Studio at 27 West Front Street. The 975-square-foot storefront was last occupied by Down to the Felt, a retailer of parlor games now operating out of 182 West Front, according to its website.

• Sunkissed Airbrush Tanning opened in a tiny second-floor space upstairs from That Hot Dog Place, in the alleyway beside the Dublin House on Monmouth Street in Red Bank.

• Lucki Clover, a women’s clothing and accessories store, opened in half the space formerly taken by Zebu Forno, at 20 Broad. The other half is set to be the home of a Boardwalk Fresh Burgers & Fries, setting up an interesting potential hamburger war with Jr.’s, not to mention existing restaurants.

• Workers were seen doing early prep work recently in the planned home of Subway Café, a 28-seat “hip” variation on the sandwich shop chain’s usual offerings, at 60 Broad Street, in a long-vacant space between the Red Bank Nail Salon and Hip & Humble Home furnishings.

• 12 Monmouth is being outfitted for Ice Costume Jewelry, which hopes to open in just a couple of weeks, store manager Ashely Goral tells Churn. The space was most recently home to Soapmarket, which vacated in January to become an online-only retailer.

• Elio Ventrella’s The Glam Bar hair styling salon – blowouts, no cuts – opened for business, after a glammy red-carpet style opening party. (That’s the salon’s designer lounge at right.) The salon replaces Butterfly Fine Arts at 116 Broad.

• Lucky Break Billiards and Café, opened at 14 West Front Street.  The gaming parlor, with five pool tables and a shuffleboard table, is situated within steps of five bars.

[See corrections at the bottom of this article]

Construction of an addition to the upscale Atrium at Navesink Harbor senior-citizens residence in Red Bank is expected to start next week with nearly all 60 units spoken for, according to officials at Springpoint Senior Living.

Long before the build-out is complete, however, an eyesore lot at the fork of West Front Street and Riverside Avenue will be transformed into a green-trimmed parking area for use by Atrium residents – and attended by valets, says company chief financial administrative officer Chuck Mooney.

An architect’s rendering of the six-story addition, at right above, as seen from Riverside Avenue.

The triangular one-acre lot, which was once home to a car dealership and won approval in 2005 as the site of an office building that never saw the light of day, will serve as a staging area for construction of the six-story addition to the existing 12-story Atrium on Riverside Avenue. Work should be completed in December 2012, Mooney says.

But just 30 or so days after the $35 million addition starts, backhoes will also tear into the cracked asphalt lot across the street, Mooney tells redbankgreen. The resulting 98-car, secure-access lot will be reserved for Atrium residents and their guests, whose cars are to be parked and retrieved by valets following specified traffic patterns dictated by the borough zoning board to mitigate traffic impacts.

The valet service is just one of many perks at the Atrium, a  continuing care retirement community that offers gourmet meals, onsite banking, pontoon-boat river cruises and in-apartment healthcare. Residents pay entry fees of $350,000 to $1 million, plus monthly service fees of up to $4,500 to live there.

Springpoint has already spent more than $15 million renovating the formerly drab senior’s residence it acquired for $7 million from the American Baptist Estate in 2005, when it was known as Navesink House.

In spite of the tough economy, particularly for real estate, the addition is virutally sold out, Mooney says. Eleven of the planned units have been reserved by singles and couples who already live at the Atrium, he says, and all 60 units are under contract, though a contract-attrition rate of 15 to 18 percent in the industry means that a waiting list of buyers will certainly be tapped, he says.

The sellout, he says, is proof of demand for active lifestyles by today’s seniors.

“The typical model is 50 acres in a country setting,” Mooney says of retirement communities. “Now, the residents want to be more integrated into the local community, to stay with the same doctors they already see, to go to the same restaurants.”

The Atrium, which is Springpoint’s only urban facility, draws its residents from within a five-mile radius, whereas similar projects typically draw from 15 to 25 miles out, Mooney says.

[Correction and clarification: Mooney's title is "chief administrative officer," not chief financial officer. We apologize for the error.

Regarding the fees cited above, those came from information provided to redbankgreen in 2009. Mooney tells us that the entry fees have since been adjusted downward, so that they now range from $200,800 to $949,000, and that monthly service fees begin at $3,500. "The majority of the apartments have monthly service fees significantly below $4,500," Mooney says.]

By DUSTIN RACIOPPI

The Red Bank Human Relations Committee must’ve thought it had all its bases covered when it drafted a diversity statement and sent it along to the borough council for adoption last week.

But even though it was a “wonderful gesture,” said resident Stephen Mitchell, the statement, which highlights the borough’s acceptance of diversity, was missing one contingent to make it fully embracing: non-believers.

Mitchell, an atheist, pointed out that 15 percent of Americans are religious non-believers, and thus the statement should reflect that.

So the council amended the statement to include the group.

Now it reads, with the amendment in bold:

Diversity, when it is accepted and respected, is a tremendous strength and asset for any community. It encompasses an understanding that each individual is unique and valuable to the welfare of the community. It recognizes and celebrates the differences amongst individuals, and capitalizes on the strengths resulting from these differences. Diversity works best when a community explores these differences in a safe, positive, and nurturing environment. The Human Relations Advisory Committee of Red Bank, NJ, in an effort to set an example for inclusivity, adopts the broadest definition of diversity with the following statement: The dimensions of diversity shall include, but are not limited to the following: race, ethnicity, persons of faith and non-believers, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity, disability, socioeconomic status, cultural orientation, physical abilities, political beliefs, age, and national origin and status.

Simple enough. And now, with the adoption of the statement, Red Bank has on the books a document that Mayor Pasquale Menna called a “no-brainer” and, along with the pending completion by council members of a diversity survey, helps earn the borough points in the Sustainable Jersey program.

When the council was first asked to review the statement in April, Menna said “Diversity has been our credo forever, since Moses came down from the mountain. We haven’t deviated from that at all.”

By DUSTIN RACIOPPI

New Jersey, it seems, is always on the defensive. There’s the ‘Jersey stinks‘ stigma, and while we have the small luxuries of pork roll sandwiches and not having to pump our own gas, the Garden State can’t quite get past the perception that it’s a dump with mafia ties and is a breeding ground for ultra-tanned, fist-pumping troublemakers.

In reality, all one really has to do is stop looking at photo galleries glamorizing the bronzed figureheads and TV shows celebrating jaw-dropping indulgence and take a trip to a place without a boardwalk or parkway rest stop.

Like, say, Rumson.

CBS News did, and on an upcoming Sunday morning plans to air a piece showcasing all this affluent community has to offer: shoreline tranquility, a bustling business district, horse-and-carriage rides, speed-boating on the Navesink — you know, the typical wintertime stuff.

But the story is not that CBS made this discovery a half-year ago, nor was it interviewer Mo Rocca‘s yacht club-ish outfit, a pink Oxford and baby blue shorts.

“The story is if you’re not from New Jersey, you probably have the wrong impression with the state,” said Mayor John Ekdahl, who was interviewed for the feature and takes the patently-odd comedian/reporter/personality Rocca on a daylong tour of Rumson.

In a YouTube preview clip, Rocca, who made his visit to Rumson in August, shares a horse-drawn carriage with Ekdahl, feeds horses, has a drink at the Rumson Country Club and soaks in the beauty of the Navesink from the Oceanic Bridge. And at each interval acts amazed that he’s in New Jersey.

“It is very, very pretty,” Rocca says to Ekdahl as they share a view from the Oceanic. “And it’s in New Jersey, right?”

“It’s in New Jersey,” Ekdahl says.

“You’re sure about that?” Rocca asks again.

Ekdahl said the feature’s angle is to show viewers another side of the state by visiting four towns with something different to offer besides night clubs and beaches.

“It’s a big plus, really,” he said. “It’s like a different look at what you can find in New Jersey. That’s the premise, that New Jersey is more than the Turnpike and Snooki.”

redbankgreen will update you on when Rumson will be featured on CBS Sunday Morning as soon the firm air date becomes available.

By DUSTIN RACIOPPI

Chicago may be a toddlin‘ town, but Red Bank is tweetin.’

A new study shows that the borough has one of the highest densities of Twitter users in New Jersey, coming in ninth overall among its towns and cities. According to the independent study, conducted by the communications and publications firm Jaffe Communications, Red Bank has 17.61 users per 1,000 people.

Twitter’s 140-character message limit fits a broad spectrum of users, and you can tell by a simple search who in town is taking advantage of it — store owners, professionals, bands, students. redbankgreen, for example, touts each new article under @redbankgreenman.

“It’s become part of the everyday language,” said Tom Sullivan, a web developer who lives in Middletown and works on Broad Street.

Tom Sullivan, who works in Red Bank, shares news, thoughts and links on Twitter. (Photo by Dustin Racioppi)

He’s probably better known as @robotictom, his personal Twitter handle. Or @noturnonred, the name he uses for professional matters, such as e-commerce. Sullivan says Twitter enables him to quickly find out what’s going on in the world and let others know what’s going on around him. He tweets about an array of topics, ranging from news to where he’s having lunch.

“It’s just a very, very valuable tool to share information, share ideas and kind of throw a question out there and see what happens,” he said.

@Mrs. Red Bank, aka Donnalyn Giegrich, sees a ton of potential in “engaging in the Twitterverse.” The insurance agent/motivational speaker/beauty pageant maven puts on clinics on Friday nights afternoons to give insight how to properly use Twitter to your advantage. She’s dealing with the everyone from the novice to the salty pro looking to hone his or her skills, she said.

And, “I’m sold out a week in advance,” Giegrich said.

So she’s not surprised Red Bank has so many tweeters, although she’d like to see a higher ranking in the future. Giegrich sees tweeting as nothing more than a free, easy-to-use way to get the word out, whatever that word is.

For her, it’s Red Bank.

“I’m all about Red Bank. It’s never about you, it’s always about promoting somebody else,” she said.

But using the increasingly-popular site can often be time consuming and become more work than you ever bargained for when signing up. Take it from Preston Porter, who’s juggling three Twitter accounts daily.

Actually, it’s his job.

Porter is the “social media chef” for Victor Rallo Jr.’s restaurants, Basil T’s in Red Bank and Undici in Rumson. In between writing newsletters, editing videos and posting Facebook updates, Porter, of Red Bank, is monitoring for any news or information coming across the Twitter wire that’s relevant to beer, wine and food. Then he shares his own news and information. It moves around the Internet quickly and he’s on to the next thing, be it his personal account or scanning for feedback from his followers.

“It’s kind of a triple split personality,” Porter, 23, said.

Since he’s a relative newcomer to Red Bank — he grew up in Lavallette — Twitter has also allowed him to make new friends and put faces to the names he’d been following online. Last year, Basil T’s hosted what the technorati call a “tweetup,” in which Twitter users pick a time and place to mingle, geek out or otherwise socialize in the real world.

Some people find they can easily live without Twitter, of course. Seventeen-year-old Sean Rempel gave it a shot, mainly to follow celebrities, and found it wasn’t for him.

“I put a couple things up there, but then I realized it was pointless so I stopped,” he said.

That’s a response one might expect from an older generation of Luddites. But as Rempel sat around a table full of peers at free-WiFi enabled Zebu Forno last week, only one other person, Dani Berkowitz, admitted to finding value in Twitter.

Berkowitz, 17, uses the site much as Porter does. She’s an actress, so whatever auditions she has coming up or new ideas she comes across, she tweets it, then moves on.

“I just put my name out there and hope somebody sees it,” she said.

Will there continue to be high numbers of people, and many more, using this social media phenomenon in Red Bank, though?

Giegrich, Porter and Sullivan suspect so. All have made it part of their lives. Most any Red Bank business you can think of is using it. Even Borough Hall tweets its upcoming meetings, agendas and other resources.

Really, it’s no wonder Red Bank is so high on the list of Twitter users.

“It’s definitely very usable,” Sullivan said. “It’s very powerful right now.”

You can check out Jaffe’s study here: twitter-study

Trailing in three recent New Jersey polls, the wife of Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain is set to visit a GOP redoubt next week: Rumson, where no Democrat is said to have been elected to the local governing body in the town’s 101-year history.

The planned visit was reported on the PolitickerNJ blog.

Cindy McCain will attend a fundraiser Tuesday morning at the West River Road home of Lewis Eisenberg, a former finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. That night, the candidate himself will make an appearance in Teaneck, the blog reports.

Neither appearance, however, has been posted on the campaign’s online calendar.

The visit comes as McCain is trying to close the gap between himself and Democrat Sen. Barrack Obama, as reflected by recent polls showing Obama ahead in the state by roughly five to nine percentage points.

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Eating crow, Belmar Mayor Ken Pringle says he’ll accept an invitation to tour Staten Island for a day to make amends for stereotyping of island residents and other visitors to his hometown.

Pringle also tells the Asbury Park Press he’ll quit writing the newsletter that blew up in his face when he characterized some Belmar tourists as “guidos” and epoxy-haired, cat-fighting women from Staten Island.

Pringle’s faux-pas generated widespread media attention, including a New York Post article that labeled him a “beach bum” from a “two-bit Jersey beach town.”

From the Press:

The mayor and the Staten Island group, SINY, have not yet set a date for his visit to the island, though Larry Ambrosino, the director of the nonprofit group, said he hoped to welcome the mayor sometime next week.

Pringle stressed that his acceptance of the invitation does not mean he needs to change his feelings toward the island.

“I have no adverse opinion of Staten Island,” he said. “”My comments were humorous.”

He added that he plans to invite SINY to Belmar to see “firsthand” the problems that renters cause here and that he described in the newsletter.

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Belmar Mayor (and Red Bank Borough Attorney) Ken Pringle is in the hotseat today for what he calls a “tongue-in-cheek” newsletter and at least one visitor to his town calls the work of “a misogynistic racist.”

In the July 4 edition of the “Belmar Summer Rental News” posted on the Belmar website and distributed in printed form, at Pringle’s cost, to rental houses in the beach town, the mayor pokes fun at Staten Islanders, blondes and “guidos” who populate the town’s bars and beaches in the summer.

Here’s an excerpt from Pringle’s account of a fight between a Staten Island woman and another from Boonton in D’Jais bar:

But Pringle apparently felt he had some license with the nomenclature, given that he cites an actual website, njguido.com, as a source for some of his insights into the species.

The Asbury Park Press has a sampling of reactions from Belmar visitors and residents, including this from a Staten Islander out on the boardwalk yesterday:

“That’s like us calling all Jersey girls skanks!” 20-year-old Samantha Padovano exclaimed after reading a story about a hairspray-wearing “SI girl” whose bar fight “ended the way most fights with SI girls do” in the July 4 issue of the Belmar Summer Rental News.

“This is what they think of us?” Padovano asked, while one of her friends suggested the mayor go do something that cannot be printed in a family newspaper.

Seventy-two year old year-round resident Pat Melango told the Press she

hides the “disgraceful” newsletter from the Italian tenants renting the upstairs apartment in her “Italian household,” she said. But she was extra careful, she said, to hide the July 4 edition and its references to “Guidos” who show up in Belmar “tanned to the color of coconut shells.”

“The majority of Belmar people don’t feel this way,” Melango said. “Certainly to specify a group of people and depict them so horribly — I think it needs an apology.”

Pringle explains himself:

“It was intended to be entertaining and get people to read the newsletter,” he said. “It’s meant to be tongue-in-cheek.”

Pringle begins writing the weekly newsletter in June, just as thousands of beach lovers descend on this milelong borough, and he posts it on the Belmar Web site. He also prints up, at his own expense, enough copies for special police officers and code enforcement officials to deliver to the borough’s 300 summer rental units, he said.

The publication’s goal, Pringle said, is to show renters how year-round residents perceive their conduct and to educate the renters about local laws on everything from “animal houses” to trash pickup.

“They come here thinking that they can get away with all this stuff and no one will bother them,” he said. “The newsletter is a way to repeatedly drum into them . . . what the rules are.”

Here’s the newsletter: Download july_4_2008_summer_rental_news.pdf

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Thirteen consulate employees will be on hand from Wednesday through Sunday to process requests for Mexican passports and consular ID cards, says Diana Litwin, a volunteer who’s helping organize what’s billed as ‘the Mexican Consulate on Wheels.’

The documents, says Litwin, in no way change the holder’s citizenship status. Rather, they provide Mexican nationals with basic identification for use in everything from banking to healthcare, and enable holders to obtain federal taxpayer ID numbers from the IRS so they can pay taxes.

“They’re already here, so tax them,” says Litwin. “When they work in restaurants and they have tax ID numbers, their bosses can put them on the payroll and hey can begin paying taxes.”

The event, one in a series being conducted in Monmouth and Ocean counties, is sponsored by Nosotros, a Spanish language newspaper published in Freehold, which is paying hotel and other costs for the visiting officials.

Meridian Health, owner of Riverview Medical Center, has contributed funds to offset expenses, Litwin says, and some 45 volunteers, many of them signed up through the United Methodist Church of Red Bank, will be on hand to help.

The consular visit is necessary, Litwin said, because it can often take eight months for a Mexican immigrant to get an appointment at the nearest consulates, in New York and Philadelphia. And many immigrants cannot afford the cost of going into the city, she said.

The event has been heavily advertised in Nosotros, and is expected to draw 1,500 to 2,000 applicants over the course of the five days. Going by recent visits by the consulate employees to Asbury Park and Lakewood, some applicants will arrive in the evening and wait overnight to ensure they’re seen, Litwin said.

The consular employees will be available from 9a to 3p each day, and expect to process about 350 requests per day. To obtain documents, applicants must present a valid birth certificate.

Because of limited space, the event will not be able to provide consultation on how to obtain taxpayer IDs, pay taxes and other responsibilities. Those services will be available, however, when the consulate on wheels moves to Long Branch starting July 22, Litwin said.

Employees of Bank of America will be on hand to set up bank accounts for clients once they have their paperwork, Litwin said.

Here are a press release describing the program and a letter sent to residents of Chestnut and Oakland streets:

• Download press_release.doc

• Download letter.doc

http://ads.redbankgreen.com/2008/05/woman-charged-i.html

Red Bank police have charged a Tinton Falls woman in a string of cases in which she’s alleged to have pretended to be either a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency officer.

Maria Collins, 41, of Buford Place is in he Monmouth County lockup facing charges of robbery and impersonating an officer.

According to Capt. Steve McCarthy, borough police were summoned shortly before noon Sunday to the corner of Bridge Avenue and Chestnut Street, where a 31-year-victim reported that she’d been stopped by a woman driving a car who had demanded to see her identification.

The woman in the car “displayed what appeared to be a handgun,” took the victim’s purse and fled in the car, McCarthy said.

Shortly afterward, Middletown police were summoned to the Sav-On pharmacy in the Lincroft Acme supermarket on a report that a woman was trying to fraudulently obtain prescription drugs. Collins was arrested by Officer David Crenshaw.

Crenshaw thought Collins resembled a woman described in a TRAK alert issued by Red Bank investigators to other police departments, and so Middletown contacted Red Bank, said township Lt. Joe Capriotti. When Collins was released on her own recognizance on the prescription charge, she was turned over to Red Bank, Capriotti said.

Collins was charged with robbery by Red Bank police, and municipal Judge William Himelman set bail at $50,000.

Subsequently, Red Bank Sgt. Eliot Ramos and Investigator Errico Vescio continued to look in the robbery case and “noticed that there were some similarities to a case from April 30,” McCarthy said.

That case involved a 29-year-old borough resident who reported she’d been approached on East Sunset Avenue by a female in a car who identified herself as an immigration officer and demanded that the victim get into the car. Instead, the victim walked away and called police.

That victim told police her 27-year-old sister, also a Red Bank resident, had been similarly approached a day earlier by a woman in a car who identified herself as an immigration officer and demanded that the victim get in the car. But at that moment, a patrol car passed by and the suspect left the area.

No weapon was reported as having been shown in the April 29 and 30 incidents, McCarthy said.

This morning, Collins, who was being held at the Monmouth County jail in Freehold, was also charged with the April 29 and 30 counts.

McCarthy said all three Red Bank victims were Hispanic. He asked that anyone else who might have been approached in a similar manner tell police by calling the detective division at 732.530.2719 or the anonymous tip line at 732.450.9704.

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