FAIR HAVEN: SENDOFF FOR A TWO-WAR VET
Fair Haven residents stood in respect along River Road Monday for Ray Taylor (right), an Army veteran of two wars who died January 17 at the age of 99.
RED BANK: FIREFIGHTER’S KILLER SENTENCED
Andrew Hill was a 26-year-old second lieutenant at the Westside Hose Company when he was killed. (Photo from Facebook. Click to enlarge.)
By JOHN T. WARD
The admitted killer of Red Bank firefighter Andrew Hill has been sentenced to 13 years in prison for the crime, the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office reported Friday.
RED BANK: MAN ADMITS KILLING FIREFIGHTER
Firefighter Andrew Hill in a 2018 photo on his Facebook page. (Click to enlarge.)
By JOHN T. WARD
A 24-year-old Red Bank man has admitted guilt in the 2018 stabbing death of volunteer borough firefighter Andrew Hill, the Asbury Park Press reported Tuesday.
Hill, a 26-year-old second lieutenant at the Westside Hose Company, died in the early hours of May 27, shortly after being stabbed just blocks away from the Leighton Avenue firehouse where he found his purpose in life.
RED BANK: HONORS FOR SLAIN FIREFIGHTER
Firefighters gathered at Calvary Baptist Church for a special service in memory of Andrew Hill prior to his funeral. (Photos by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge.)
By JOHN T. WARD
Red Bank firefighters gave a formal sendoff Tuesday to one of their own, a 26-year-old volunteer slain just blocks away from the firehouse where he found his purpose in life, in the words of Mayor Pasquale Menna.
In an open casket at the Calvary Baptist Church on Bridge Avenue, Andrew Hill‘s remains were dressed in the formal blue firefighters’ uniform he’d recently finished paying for.
Outside, the fire engine on which he’d answered numerous alarms waited to carry his casket to a cemetery.
FAIR HAVEN: KOCH RECALLED WITH HUMOR
Pallbearers with the casket of Councilman Jerome Koch, below, who died Sunday. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge)
By JOHN T. WARD
Friends and family eulogized Fair Haven Councilman Jerome A. Koch, Jr. with love and humor in the form of some of his favorite aphorisms Thursday, four days after he died from injuries suffered in a bicycling accident on River Road.
Setting aside the “nightmare” circumstances of Koch’s death, one of his four children told a packed Church of the Nativity that her father “would be telling us to knock off with the crying.”
RED BANK: ‘PROPER SENDOFF’ PLANNED
Chief Steve McCarthy, who died Monday, laying a wreath at the September 11, 2001 memorial in Red Bank’s Riverside Gardens Park two years ago. (Click to enlarge)
Funeral arrangements have been made for Red Bank police Chief Steve McCarthy, who died Monday at age 50.
A viewing is scheduled for 4 to 8 p.m. Thursday at John E. Day Funeral Home on Riverside Avenue, Captain Darren McConnell tells redbankgreen.
RED BANK: TOWN HALL MOURNS A LOST FRIEND
Bunting hung above the police station door and flags flew at half-staff in memory of Red Bank police Chief Steve McCarthy shortly after his death Monday. (Click to enlarge)
By JOHN T. WARD
Red Bank officials, grieving the loss of a colleague, have began preparations for a final salute to police Chief Steve McCarthy, who died in Manhattan Monday after a battle with cancer.
“It’s a sad, sad day,” said assistant construction official John Drucker, echoing a comment heard frequently throughout borough hall, at 90 Monmouth Street.
Mayor Pasquale Menna said the police department was filled with sadness and “a lot of tears” over the death of McCarthy, at age 50, to a rare and fast-moving thyroid cancer.
Flags on borough poles were lowered to half-staff, and black-and-purple bunting was hung over the entrance to the police station.
Police officers who had taken turns driving McCarthy to treatments at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in recent months were preparing to accommodate “hundreds of law enforcement officials, from all over the state,” for a viewing expected to be held later this week at the John E. Day Funeral Home, Menna said.
Monday afternoon, a two-car police escort quietly accompanied McCarthy’s remains back to the town he’d served for 27 years.
A LITTLE BIT COUNTRY, A LITTLE BIT MOBILE
A mobile language lab at RBR will be stocked with iPads when it opens in September, thanks to a donation from the school’s fundraising foundation. (Click to enlarge)
By DANIELLE TEPPER
Come September, Red Bank Regional High School will have a fully operational Apple Mobile classroom for the 2012-2013 school year for its world language classes.
The RBR Education Foundation recently presented the Board of Education with a check for $28,000 to purchase an iPad cart equipped with 35 iPads and three MacBooks with a two-year protection program, as well as a voucher for applications available to foster the acquisition of foreign language.
This level of accessibility into other cultures and languages is completely unprecedented, said assistant principal Will Smith.
FERNANDES FUNERAL SLATED FOR SATURDAY
Above, former Mayor Maria Fernandes, seen being interviewed by a TV news crew in 2008. Below, bunting blows in the breeze at Sea Bright’s borough hall Monday in her honor. (Click to enlarge)
Details of the funeral for the late Maria Fernandes, the former Sea Bright mayor, were announced Monday in the SeaBreeze, the borough newsletter.
Dear SeaBreeze Subscribers,
For those of you who have not heard the news, with regret, we report that Honorable Maria Fernandes passed away yesterday morning.
RECALLING “A GOOD DOSE OF HUMOR”
Our Comment of the Week comes from beneath the story “LEHNERT LAID TO REST,” about the funeral of the late Fair Haven Councilman John Lehnert.
The very publication of the article, which included three photographs from the funeral, miffed a couple of readers, while others saw it as as respectful.
But a reader who identified herself as Claudia stayed away from that debate. Instead, she took the opportunity provided by the comments to deliver an overdue thank-you to Lehnert, who served as a Fair Haven police officer for 14 years before retiring in 2006.
LEHNERT LAID TO REST
Scenes from the funeral of Councilman John Lehnert in Fair Haven Saturday. (Photos by Peter Lindner. Click to enlarge)
Fair Haven Councilman John Lehnert, who took his own life last Tuesday, was laid to rest Saturday following a funeral mass at the Church of the Nativity.
A former Fair Haven policeman and member of the governing body since 2007, Lehnert was 46 years old. He is survived by his wife, Elaine, and two daughters.
The Asbury Park Press carried an obituary on Thursday.
