Nassau County jail was ordered to enact a long-overdue oversight panel.

Long Island’s county jails have been shackled by a string of legal setbacks in the past month as a new $185 million correctional center opens in Suffolk County.

Five female ex-inmates at Suffolk jail in Riverhead filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against a corrections officer and, in a separate case, a judge consolidated claims by more than 100 inmates into a class-action suit alleging conditions there are deplorable. Nassau County jail also got bad news when New York State criticized the East Meadow facility for failing to prevent a former soldier from committing suicide and a judge ordered the county to implement an oversight panel that had been neglected by the past three county executives.

“None of it is surprising at all,” said Barbara Allan, founder of Prison Families Anonymous, a Long Island-based inmate advocacy group. “They both leave a lot to be desired,” she said of the jails on either side of the county line.

The developments come after Nassau County jail had seven inmate deaths in two years, including five suicides—giving it one of the highest county jail suicide rates statewide—a medical death and an inmate homicide that’s still under investigation. Inmates reportedly died at Suffolk jail in February and last June.

Nassau County Jail: Suicides, Health Care Changes, Budget Cuts Prompt Calls For Oversight

The New York State Commission on Correction found that Bartholomew Ryan, a 32-year-old ex-Marine from Seaford who’d served in Iraq, was not on suicide watch despite Nassau jail knowing he needed constant mental health supervision before he hanged himself in his cell on Feb. 24, 2012.

“He received inadequate evaluation and treatment by Armor Correctional Health Care, Inc.,” the commission wrote in its partially redacted five-page report. Armor is the private firm hired by Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano to treat inmates at the jail. The agency recommended the firm and the jail retrain staffers and make Automatic External Defibrillators more easily accessible to help save inmates quicker.

Representatives for Armor referred questions to jail officials, who were not available for comment. Nassau County Attorney John Ciampoli said Nassau Sheriff Michael Sposato is “very conscientious” and that the jail’s “policies and procedures are constantly under review to make them the best that they can be.”

The explanation was little consolation to Ryan’s grieving family, which is suing the jail.

“This entity couldn’t get it together enough to actually be there to help save his life,” Thomas Ryan, the soldier’s brother, told News12 Long Island.  “How could Nassau County, one of the richest counties in the country, not have the proper training in the jail? It’s ridiculous to me that that could happen.”

The March 19 corrections commission report on Ryan was issued the same day that U.S. District Court Judge Joanna Seybert granted class-action status for plaintiffs in 111 individual lawsuits making similar claims of grotesquely inhumane conditions at Suffolk County’s two jails. Among those allegations are broken toilets “ping-ponging” waste between cells, mold-encrusted showers, overcrowding, rodent and insect infestations and inadequate heating.

A new minimum-security jail in Yaphank was mandated by New York State to increase capacity and ease overcrowding in Riverhead, although construction has yet to begin on a second phase of the jail that’s projected to cost more than $100 million.

“For too long, county officials have been content to force people to live in degrading conditions that are unfit for a civilized society,” said Amol Sinha, director of the New York Civil Liberty Union’s Suffolk chapter. “It’s time for them to meet their moral and constitutional obligations to provide humane conditions at the jails.”

The federal suit includes inmates who were held at Suffolk’s jails in both Riverhead and Yaphank as far back as 2009—jail inmates who haven’t made bail while their trials were pending or were serving sentences of less than one year on misdemeanor convictions, as opposed to convicted felons serving prison time in an upstate penitentiary.

A Suffolk County Sheriff’s Office representative referred questions about the lawsuit to the county attorney’s office.

“We don’t comment on pending litigation,” Suffolk County Attorney Dennis Brown said. “We will review the papers and we will defend the interest of the county and its employees.”

A week after that pair of same-day developments, Acting State Supreme Court Justice James McCormack ordered Mangano to comply with a county charter provision mandating the establishment of an independent, seven-member board charged with overseeing and reforming conditions at Nassau jail—a mandate that has gone unfulfilled since 1990.

“More than 20 years after Nassau County voters overwhelmingly approved this charter amendment, there will finally be much-needed oversight at the jail,” said Jason Starr, director of the NYCLU’s Nassau chapter. The group has received hundreds of complaints from Nassau jail inmates about being deprived of medication, mental health services and the mistreatment of people with disabilities.

Nassau County Attorney John Ciampoli said the appointments will be made within the 90-day deadline that the judge set. “We’ve advised the court that a full seven appointments are now pending before the legislature from the county executive,” Ciampoli said.

Once they’re appointed, the Board of Visitors’ volunteer panelists—people with a “working knowledge of the correctional system,” mandates the amendment—will have an office at the jail as well as access to jail records, books and data.

Five days after that ruling, a quintet of women filed a federal lawsuit alleging that in 2009 and 2010 they “were subjected to sexual assault, sexual harassment and sexually degrading treatment by Sergeant Joseph Foti,” who has since retired. They also claim that he punished them when they complained about the harassment.

The Sheriff’s office also referred questions on this case to the county attorney, who could only say that he would “vigorously” defend the county.

The plaintiffs include former pre-trial detainees Sharon Watts, Tara Lucente, Michelle Atkinson, Jamie Culoso and Catherine Andres, who estimate in their lawsuit that more than 40 other women were also sexually harassed but are afraid to come forward.

“Get used to it, you’re in jail,” Corrections Officer Santa Cruz, head of security at the jail, allegedly told Watts when she complained, according to the lawsuit. They’re represented by Southold-based attorney Laura A. Solinger, who’s also seeking class-action status.

“Because these women are incarcerated, they’re literally trapped and can’t leave,” she told Newsday. “It’s unlike at a job, where you can get in you car and drive away. You’re so vulnerable there. This makes this abuse that much more intense. They have to stay where they are and see him the next day, and the next day and the next.”

Charles Matthews was charged Tuesday with endangering the welfare of a child and obstruction of governmental administration.

Southold Town Police said the girl’s mother reported her daughter missing Monday after finding a note that caused the family to fear for the victim’s safety—a case that mirrored that of 16-year-old Ashley Murray of Peconic, who was found safe last month after 12 days missing.

Local authorities and State University of New York Police found the girl in Matthews’ dorm room after he allegedly wasn’t forthcoming about the girl’s whereabouts, police said.

He was released on $250 bail.

Photo by Katherine Schroeder courtesy of North Fork School for Dogs

Imagine a place where dogs run freely together, playfully romping on fresh green grass. Where canines of myriad breeds share the same water fountain while their owners exchange ideas. A place that’s clean, accessible, popular, safe.

While it may sound like dog heaven, this is actually a common description of a dog park—designated off-leash areas where canines can get much-needed exercise and socialization time while their owners trade tips on everything from training to proper nutrition. And following a national trend, they’re sprouting up all across Long Island.

“We’ve seen a really big increase in dog parks on Long Island, both in Nassau and Suffolk counties, over the last five or six years,” says Ginny Munger Kahn, president of nonprofit LI-Dog Owners Group. “It’s been the result of collaborations between organizations of dog owners and elected officials and parks department officials.”

Currently Nassau has 10 dog parks and Suffolk has 11, she adds. Just six years ago Suffolk had only one. Just within the past year, three new dog parks opened in Nassau County: in Valley Stream, Massapequa and Eisenhower Park. And more are set to open in both counties.
Supporters point to several reasons why dog parks are gaining ground.

Advocates contend that dog parks provide much-needed open space for those owners who may otherwise not have adequate backyards for their pets to roam in.

“There’s a lot of people that can’t exercise their dogs off-leash, especially the elderly, and it’s a great way to exercise your dogs,” says dog trainer Dawn Bennett.

Another major benefit, they say, is that socialization and exercise have been known to positively impact a dog’s behavior.

“People talk about how they see their dog’s behavior change for the better because they are getting adequate exercise at a dog park,” says Munger Kahn. “Over the last ten years it’s become common knowledge that dogs need exercise and socialization.”

Additionally, Kahn points out, dog parks are great place for owners to meet like-minded people.

“They build communities,” she says. “Many of my best friends I’ve met through the dog park.”

There’s definitely a need here on Long Island. Dogs are only permitted in Suffolk County parks if they are on a leash, she explains. In Nassau, no dogs are allowed in county parks—leashed or unleashed. Most town parks across Long Island carry the same or similar rules.

“I adopted a dog and realized that there is no place to walk your dog in parks or take her off leash,” says Peggy Heijmen, an Oyster Bay resident, dog owner and nonprofit LI-Dog Owners Group board member. “It’s very, very difficult.”
The group, founded in 1998, is dedicated to increasing public parkland for Long Island dog owners and their four-legged companions. Their efforts are paying off. Heijmen was the driving force behind the Massapequa dog park.

“We went to several town board meetings and did petitions and wrote letters to get this park running and successful,” she says.

Opened in June 2012 on Louden Avenue, the park features such amenities as doggie water fountains and separate areas for small and large dogs.

“It has been incredibly successful,” she continues. “We have a Facebook page so that people can share their pictures and their experiences, and we have over 200 people actively using the page.”

The Valley Stream dog park opened a month prior, mainly the brainchild of the Friends of Valley Stream Dog Park, an all-volunteer group organized to support and provide facilities to local dog owners.

President Richard Infield says the project went off without a hitch after receiving the support of the Valley Stream Mayor Edwin Fare and other members of local government.

“Once we started, it was very much a team effort between us and the village,” he says. “It’s really been an easy relationship and continues to be.”

UNLEASHED
Government officials and dog park proponents have been joining forces to open more spaces in Suffolk County, too. In July a dog park in Calverton opened under the guidance of Riverhead Town Councilman Jim Wooten and nonprofit Move the Animal Shelter (MTAS).

“We initiated the Calverton dog park to address the needs of our senior community, who live in modular homes or smaller lots,” says Woonten. “It gives their pets a chance to run about and play and socialize with other dogs.”

MTAS secured funding for the park, he adds, which along with private donations of benches and fencing, helped keep the cost down for taxpayers. After all, it’s the startup costs that can pose hurdles. Lack of funding was one of the obstacles Bennett faced when she tried to secure a bigger dog park in Southold, she says.

“I had come back from California and I was blown away with how many dog parks were there and how dog-friendly they were,” explains Bennett. “And here, where we live, the only off-leash area we had was this pitiful, very barren quarter of an acre dog park that wasn’t used by anybody.

Bennett and her business partner Asha Gallacher, who together run the North Fork School for Dogs, decided to create a petition for their cause. After two months, the duo collected about 500 signatures.

“I just put the petitions in every store,” Bennett says. “We collaborated with all the pet stores and the animal shelter. The squeaky wheel gets the oil—I just went to every town meeting and got all the petitions together.”

While the request to build a new park was ultimately denied, officials agreed to expand upon an existing dog park. The environmental nonprofit Group for the East End donated trees for shade, and the town installed benches. After a year, the park was completely overhauled and is now more than an acre in size and full of people and dogs every weekend.

Bennett is grateful for the help from Southold Town Supervisor Scott Russell.

“He was very corporative and he was a big help,” she says. “He listened. Even though we had a strict budget, he gave us a piece of the recreational pie.”

PUPPY LOVE
Dog parks aren’t just gaining popularity here on Long Island. According to data from the Trust for Public Land’s 2011 City Park Facts, dog parks in major U.S. cities jumped 34 percent over the last five years. In comparison, parks overall only increased 3 percent during that time.

“This is not unique to Long Island,” says Munger Kahn. “There’s a tremendous demand for these areas, and a love for them.

“They are now what the playground movement of the 1950s was,” she adds.

So far, Long Island’s new dog parks have garnered so much positive reception that more are in the works. In Suffolk, the LI-Dog Owners Group is working on a campaign to build a second dog park in Centereach with Town of Brookhaven Councilwoman Kathleen Walsh. Councilman Wooten also hopes to create another dog park this spring at Stotzy Park in Riverhead. In Nassau, Heijmen is now looking to add more dog parks in the Town of Oyster Bay.

Besides the additional parks, owners also seek more on-leash access in both counties’ parks.

“A lot of people exercise with their dogs,” says Munger Kahn. “Dog walking is their primary form of exercise. At most Long Island town parks you’re not allowed to even walk your dog on a leash. So dog owners are regulated to walk on the sidewalks in the neighborhoods that have them or in the street, and it’s dangerous.”

Munger Kahn says the main criticism against this is concern about people not picking up after their dogs. Yet with increased access, she says, comes increased accountability among responsible dog owners. And that can only lead to more access for dog lovers.

“We understand by asking for more access it means we have to be responsible. We have to pick up after our dogs,” she says. “I am confident that as long as the majority of us dog owners are responsible and pick up after our dogs that we will continue to see improvement in gaining access to public park land.”

“I think that as more dog parks have been developed, elected officials have seen how successful and popular they are,” she adds.

It’s a sentiment Councilman Wooten shares.

“Dog parks are a wonderful thing,” he says.

Ashley Murray

Ashley Murray, the 16-year-old Peconic girl who went missing 12 days ago, walked into Southold Town Police headquarters safe and sound Friday, authorities said.

Murray, who was reported missing from her Springs Lane home Monday, Feb. 25, showed up at the North Fork police station at 3:15 p.m., according to investigators. But police could not say where she’s been.

“She was in good physical condition and she stayed with us until around 4:30,” said Southold Town Police Chief Martin Flatley, noting that she arrived with a friend.

Investigators had teamed with Suffolk police, the FBI and the Center for Missing and Exploited Children in the high-profile search that included a search party organized by friend and family.

Flatley said Murray was taken to a local hospital for evaluation.

“Even though the searching is over, the investigation is still active,” he added.

Ashley Murray

Southold Town Police are asking for public’s help in finding a 16-year-old girl who went missing from her North Fork home this week.

Police said Ashley Murray was last seen at 8 a.m. Monday leaving her Spring Lane home in Peconic wearing a black shirt, gray hooded sweatshirt, red sweatpants and black boots.

She is described as white, 5-feet, 4-inches tall, 140 pounds with brown hair and blue eyes. She wears hearing aids in both ears, police noted.

Friends and family created an “Ashley Come Home” Facebook page to help publicize her photo.

Police ask that anyone with information about Murray’s whereabouts to call them at 631-765-2600. All callers will remain confidential.

WHAT A PAIR: David Rothman was in his work clothes and Albert Einstein was dressed for the beach when they posed on this rock at Horseshoe Cove in Nassau Point in the summer of 1939.
(Photo by Reginald Donahue/Courtesy the Rothmans)

Scientists at the Brookhaven National Laboratory call this coming Feb. 11 the “cool-down” day. That’s when they start chilling the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider to the temperature of liquid helium (more than 450 degrees below zero) so they can begin colliding polarized protons in a series of physics experiments set to run through the spring that would have thrilled Albert Einstein, had he lived long enough to see them.

The world-renown scientist will be there in spirit, no doubt, because “all nuclear and particle physicists owe a debt to Einstein,” says Robert Crease, a Stony Brook professor and the lab’s official historian who wrote “Making Physics: The first 25 years of the history of BNL” and is now working on the sequel.

The circular subterranean electro-magnetic corridor collider, known as RHIC (pronounced “Rick”) for short, “relies very essentially on Einstein’s theory of relativity,” says Berndt Mueller, BNL’s associate director for nuclear and particle physics, because it explores a non-linear strong force similar to gravity.  “If Einstein were alive today, I think he would be very fascinated by the results.”

For Einstein, who died in 1955, Long Island only meant a place where he could enjoy himself.

In 1937 the Long-Islander mentioned that Einstein had “passed the summer” at Maud Klots’ home on West Shore Road, which runs along Huntington Harbor, and sailed to Halesite to pick up his mail.  If he made much of a splash on his vacation, it didn’t last long.

The same can’t be said for the memorable months he spent out east in 1939 when he rented a cottage on Nassau Point in Cutchogue so he could put his sailboat in Horseshoe Cove. Before that summer was over Einstein would sign a letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt warning him that the United States couldn’t afford to wait while Nazi Germany was possibly making a nuclear weapon.

But that dire notion was far from his mind when he took his sister Maja, his step-daughter Margot, his son Hans, and his secretary Helen Dukas to the North Fork. They even brought a little Airedale terrier that scratched frantically at a door in the living room whenever Einstein would try to close it, prompting him to ask a visitor once: “Do you suppose he can see the door is contracting in the direction of its motion, and he does not know what to make of it and it makes him angry?”

The answer eluded him but the question showed how he thought, even on holiday. His summer place is still there on West Cove Road (Einstein had misspelled it “Grove” in a letter). The house has changed, and the neighborhood has grown, but he might recognize the lingering sentiment. A local woman named Louise Thompson, whose parents lived across the street from him, recalled in a story that Newsday ran on the centennial of his birth in 1979, that he had “wanted to have access to the beach through our property [and] my mother wasn’t too interested in that.” After all, she said her mother told him, “Professor Einstein, you are here for privacy and so are we.”

Apparently the younger generation on Nassau Point didn’t appreciate the two main activities Einstein did to occupy his time there: sailing and violin playing. Einstein, who never learned to swim, had no pretentions about his nautical prowess. He had named his 17-foot glorified rowboat the Tinef, which is supposedly Yiddish for junk.

“We kids who were growing up here know how to sail. He didn’t,” Thompson said. “He’d tip over, and once I can remember some of the local boys going out to rescue him.”

That wasn’t an uncommon occurrence, apparently, with Einstein at the helm. After a sailing mishap in the Long Island Sound when his family had rented a cottage at Old Lyme, Conn., in 1935, the New York Times ran the headline, “Relative Tide and Sand Bars Trap Einstein.”

Thompson and her Peconic peers weren’t much impressed with Einstein’s musical prowess, either, perhaps because he’d play his instrument “all the time” on his porch during those summer evenings and “we kids didn’t think much of it. We thought he was terrible.”

Fortunately, Einstein had a big fan in Southold. David Rothman, who had opened Rothman’s Department Store in 1919, hadn’t graduated high school but he had maintained an avid interest in science. He recognized Einstein’s stepdaughter Margot when she entered his store looking for a chisel sharpener (she was a sculptor). Rothman presented it to her as a gift and asked her to convey his “respects to her father,” as he recalled.

The next day, Einstein came into the store himself looking for “sundials.” Or so Rothman thought and he dutifully showed him the one he had in the backyard. Einstein pointed to his feet. He really needed sandals, so Rothman sold him the largest pair he had left: women’s size 11. Einstein, who’d described himself in a letter to a friend as “a kind of ancient figure known primarily for his non-use of socks and wheeled out on special occasions as a curiosity,” gladly wore them all summer, along with a pair of shorts tied around his waist with a piece of rope, and a white sports shirt.

When the 60-year-old scientist had first entered his store, Rothman, then 43, was playing Mozart’s “Symphony No. 40” on his phonograph and they started talking about music. Rothman had begun playing the violin when he was 36; Einstein had started when he was six, but he insisted they play together. The next evening Rothman came out to Nassau Point with his instrument and some sheet music, but he was out of his league almost immediately and so they spent the rest of the night chatting. They clicked, and later Rothman arranged many musical evenings at his Southold home where Einstein and a few friends would play. Sometimes almost a hundred people listened outside, hoping for a glimpse of the famous scientist.

Rothman’s recollections of his experiences with his celebrated companion have been published by his daughter Joan Rothman Brill and his grandsons Ron Rothman, a talented guitarist who runs the Southold store today, and Chuck Rothman, a science fiction writer living in Schenectady.

Ron Rothman, who runs Rothman’s Department Store in Southold, holds the book he published that recounts his grandfather’s friendship with Albert Einstein in 1939. (Photo by Spencer Rumsey/Long Island Press)

“The way I see it,” says Ron Rothman, “that summer my grandfather palled around with Albert Einstein to the point where he would come in and he would sleep on the couch. He would spend time playing music, and they would go around doing things.” In the photos of his “gramps” and the scientist, Einstein is in vacation mode casual, while Rothman is wearing a business suit because “that’s the way people dressed for work then,” his grandson says with a smile.

One day Rothman waited hours for Einstein, who had planned to sail around Nassau Point to Southold. It was almost dark when the phone rang at his store, as he reminisced to Newsday. On the line was a New York City cop on vacation, who shouted, “Rothman, there’s some wild-looking guy that needs a haircut—some helluva looking looney—down here on the beach wanting to know where you live!”

Another time Einstein had just come back from sailing and Rothman was talking to him on his porch when two harried young Hungarian physicists living in exile, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner, drove up. They’d come from Manhattan to see him and couldn’t find the cottage until a kid in town had told them which one it was. Szilard, who had studied with Einstein in Berlin and even shared a patent with him for a “new, noiseless refrigerator,” was on an urgent mission because he’d had the disturbing revelation that uranium could be used to create a nuclear chain reaction.

“I never thought of that!” Einstein exclaimed in German. The two Hungarians first thought they’d get Einstein to write the queen of Belgium, Einstein’s friend, and warn her that if the Germans conquered her country, they’d gain control over the Belgian Congo, which then had the world’s largest supply of uranium. He agreed. Szilard, “who was nothing if not obsessive,” according to biographer Jeremy Bernstein, wanted to reach President Roosevelt, and so through his connections at Columbia University, he contacted one of FDR’s economics advisers, Alexander Sachs, who agreed to carry a letter to the president if it had Einstein’s signature. By that point, Wigner had gone to California so Szilard got another Hungarian physicist with a driver’s license, Edward Teller, to go back out to Nassau Point. After completing two versions, a long one and a short one, Einstein signed them both on Aug. 9, warning the president about “extremely powerful bombs of a new type.”

By 1939, Einstein had come to regard the use of force as the only way to stop fascism—but he never worked on the Manhattan Project although his letter was its spark.

Sachs gave Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt on Oct. 11, a month after Hitler had invaded Poland. The next morning Roosevelt created the Advisory Committee on Uranium, naming Szilard, Wigner and Teller to it, but not Einstein, perhaps because FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, no friend of German Jews trying to emigrate, had viewed Einstein as a security risk because he’d previously proclaimed in Europe that “I am a militant pacifist” and he kept a large file on him once he came to America.

A man of peace, Einstein would have appreciated that, since the former Camp Upton’s reincarnation as a national laboratory in 1947, the BNL never did weapons research. For decades scientists there have been committed to exploring the inner workings of the atom to advance human understanding—although their research is always at the mercy of Congressional largesse and that’s never predictable.

FINE FIDDLER: Albert Einstein, playing his violin in David Rothman’s living room, told the Southold department store owner he’d had the best summer of his life thanks to him. (Photo by David Rothman)

According to his many biographers, Einstein—“the last of the great classical physicists”—may have not liked being in a classroom (in Germany his teachers called him a “dreamy” child) but he loved sharing the profound joy he found in physics, and that’s why he was determined to explain one of his theories to Rothman before he returned to the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton. After all, when Einstein published his relativity paper in 1905, he didn’t even have a Ph.D. and was working in a patent office.

Einstein’s goal with Rothman, as Rothman told his daughter, was to demonstrate to his friend Dr. Gustav Bucky, another esteemed physicist who’d come out to Nassau Point to visit him that summer, “that a layman, in fact a mere merchant, could comprehend these problems.” Rothman’s only stipulation was that the great scientist should not use math since he’d never gone past eighth grade. Einstein assured his friend it could be done. “You know, I use no instruments,” Einstein told him. “My tools are simply a pad and a pencil. This is all I have ever needed.”

What he’d make of BNL’s multi-million-dollar high tech tool for experimental physics can only be left for speculation. According to researchers familiar with his archives, Einstein never visited the lab.

What is known is that on a Sunday afternoon in 1939 the most famous scientist of the 20^th century and the Southold department store owner spent three hours together wrestling with the problem: why a spinning rod contracts in the direction of its motion as it approaches the speed of light.

“I got nowhere in trying to grasp what he wanted me to,” Rothman recalled ruefully, and he lamented to Einstein that “the whole pad was full of mathematical symbols.” Einstein insisted that the math he was using was “quite trivial.” Rothman never understood the answer but he treasured the sheet that Einstein had covered in calculations, and his offspring later sold it for thousands of dollars to a collector.

The day before Einstein left the East End, Rothman came out to Nassau Point to see him off and he was presented with a new biography that had just come out, “Einstein: The Maker of Universes.” Einstein had inscribed it, in German: “May this book remind you of the happy times we spent together in the summer of 1939.” It was signed simply: “A. Einstein.”

Then, when Rothman took his hand to say good-bye, Einstein “put one arm affectionately around my shoulder and said, ‘You know, this has been one of the most beautiful summers of my whole life…’”

And to think it happened on Long Island.