LAST CHANCE TO NOMINATE FOR DIME BEST OF BROOKLYN! PAGE 8
BROOKLYNPAPER.COM
Since 1978 • (718) 260–2500 • Brooklyn, NY • ©2019 18 pages • Serving Brownstone Brooklyn, Sunset Park, Williamsburg & Greenpoint Vol. 42, No. 18 • May 3–9, 2019
Cops cuff YouTube streamer after D’town lockdown
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
A popular video game streamer took
to Instagram Monday to live-stream
an alleged threat to kill himself in his
apartment Downtown.
Daniel Desmond Amofah, known
online as Etika, was taken into custody
for allegedly threatening to end his life
inside his Willoughby Street apartment
between Lawrence and Bridge
streets just after 1:30 p.m., according
to police, who put the street on
lockdown for an hour after the unhinged
live post.
Amofah went on a rambling and bigoted
social media rampage, tweeting
“I fear nothing,” “f--- the Jews,” —
which he later deleted — “f----t” and
calling himself a “god.”
He also tweeted a Photoshopped image
of him pointing a gun at the camera
and posted another tweet referencing
nuclear weapons.
“I am inevitable. I always was. You
all wasted far too much time building
the nukes that I will extinguish life
with,” he wrote .
Several of his followers worried for
SCHOOL’S OUT
City closes more yeshivas for their unvaccinated kids
By Colin Mixson
Brooklyn Paper
The city announced on Monday the
closure of two Williamsburg yeshivas as
punishment for allowing unvaccinated
kids to attend class, as an outbreak of
the highly contagious measles virus
continues to sweep through Brooklyn’s
Orthodox Jewish communities.
The schools — Tiferes Bnos at 585
Marcy Ave. and Talmud Torah D’Nitra
at 1007 Bedford Ave. — violated a
neighborhood-wide emergency order
issued by Health Commissioner Oxiris
Barbot and announced by Mayor Bill
de Blasio on April 9 in a bid to stem
the spread of the potentially fatal illness,
which has infected 423 people
in Brooklyn, including 348 cases in
Williasmburg.
The city previously closed five other
Williamsburg Jewish academies for admitting
unvaccinated kids, and refusing
to provide inspectors with medical
and attendance records, including
one Williamsburg yeshiva that inspectors
have connected to more than 40
cases since January.
In addition to empowering the Health
Department to close schools, Commissioner
Barbot’s emergency declaration
authorized inspectors to issue $1,000
fines to unvaccinated residents of four
Williamsburg zip codes — 11205, 11206,
11211, and 11249 — and the agency’s
so-called “disease detectives” have
tracked down 57 people who allowed
themselves, or their children to go without
inoculation.
A group of five Williamsburg parents
sued the city in Kings County Su-
Yeshiva Kehilath Yakov in Williamsburg, where 21 cases of measles
originated amid a larger borough-wide outbreak affecting mainly Orthodox
preme Court earlier this month for the
right to not vaccinate themselves, but
Judge Lawrence Knipel dismissed the
case on April 18.
Robert Krakow, an attorney for the
plaintiffs, said he was disappointed by
the judge’s decision, but that he’s filed
an appeal and is hopeful that a higher
justice will issue a preliminary injunction
eliminating, or reducing the fine
on May 6.
Five Brooklyn measles cases — including
the original infection discovered
in October — were traced back to
trips from Israel, where another measles
outbreak infected more than 1,000
people last year.
Barbot earlier this month described
this as the largest outbreak of the measles
that New York City has experienced
since 1991, but the disease has
since spread by well over 100 additional
cases.
Measles is a highly contagious airborne
pathogen that produces symptoms
including fever, cough, and a runny
nose, and can cause diarrhea, ear infection,
pneumonia, encephalitis, and
death — with about one of every 1,367
kids infected dying due to fatal complications
from measles.
Symptoms can appear anytime from
seven to 21 days following exposure, according
to the Health Department.
Jewish children.
Photo by Colin Mixson
Police put Willoughby Street on lockdown after online video game streamer Daniel Desmond Amofah,
known online as Etika, allegedly threatened to kill himself in his apartment on April 29.
Photo by Kevin Duggan
Suicide threat frenzy
See THREAT on page 15
Butchers warn of mystery meat
Is the Slope Key Food labor dispute putting customers at risk?
By Colin Mixson
Brooklyn Paper
Butchers expelled from a Park
Slope Key Food are warning customers
to beware the pre-packaged
meat now stocked by the store’s
temporary workers, saying management
has replaced them with
a bunch of amateurs, who have
no idea when and where the beef
was cut.
“They’re bringing in some kind
of pre-packed meat,” said Freddie
Mulé, a manager at the Park
Slope Key Food’s meat department.
“We’re not even sure where it came
from. We know nothing about it,
but we know it’s in there.”
Workers at the Fifth Avenue Key
Food’s meat department have been
picketing the store since April 7,
when management locked them
— and roughly 40 other workers
hailing from stores in Brooklyn
and Long Island — out of the market’s
butchery in retaliation for a
lunchtime rally that occurred earlier
this month, as union reps negotiate
for better pay and benefits
with grocery-store-mogul Benjamin
Levine.
To replace them, owners brought
in temporary, non-union workers
to staff their meat departments. In
lieu of butchering the beef on site,
the store is now ordering its steaks
pre-cut, and the union guys are now
handing out fliers to customers disparaging
the new product as a mystery,
saying there’s no telling who
sliced it, how it was inspected, and
when it was packaged.
One local man said he agrees
with the banished butchers, saying
he decided not to shop at the
Fifth Avenue Key Food after trying
the chicken breast, which tasted
weird enough to send him to a Smith
Street butcher for his meat going
forward.
“I can’t shop at Key Food anymore,
because of the meat,” said
Fourth Avenue resident Frankie
Perez. “I tasted it. It’s wrong.”
Union reps claimed that on
Monday they spotted meat being
delivered by an unrefrigerated
Chevy SUV to a Key Food
owned by Levine in Bensonhurst
— where another lock out is in full
swing — raising additional concerns
about the Park Slope store
as the meat department workers
remain locked out.
“It’s 50 degrees out, and meat
is sitting in an unrefrigerated passenger
vehicle in the parking lot,”
said Kelly Egan, executive director
of United Food and Commercial
Workers Local 342.
Current meat department workers
at the Fifth Avenue Key Food
could not say where their meat
came from, but claimed it was cut
somewhere in Brooklyn and that
it passed muster with the federal
Agricultural Department, pointing
to “USDA Approved” stickers on
their pre-packaged pork chops.
A store manager, who only gave
his name as John, refused to say
where the meat was purchased or
cut, but refuted the union’s claim
that their meat was delivered by an
unrefrigerated passenger car.
“They’re all lies, that’s not
true,” he said.
Union negotiators have been
bargaining with Levine’s reps on
behalf of meat department workers
for more than two years, demanding
that the workers’ health
and retirement benefits cut in 2015
be reinstated, and seeking what
they claim is their first raise in
more than four years.
Owners have retaliated with fliers
posted throughout the grocery
store, claiming they’ve always offered
their employees reasonable
benefits, and that the union is lying
in an attempt to turn customers
against them.
“During this time of contract
Banished Key Food butcher Freddie Mulé with fliers claiming the grocery store’s prepackaged
meat is untrustworthy.
Photo by Colin Mixson
negotiations, Local 342 has misrepresented
our position on numerous
items in an attempt to bully
us,” the fliers read.
But workers have felt some success
in their rallies, and many locals
have shown their support by
taking the business down the road,
according to one local man.
“I refuse to go in here, I haven’t
gone there in over a month. It’s not
good. It’s not good for the workers
and it’s not good for the neighbors,”
said Don Martin, a retired police detective
residing in Park Slope.
Messages left for Levine’s lawyer,
Doug Catalano, were not returned.
Scrub it before you rebuild it!
Gowanus locals still have qualms about massive rezoning plan
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
They want a clean guarantee.
The Gowanus rezoning must
not impede the cleanup of the
neighborhood’s namesake canal,
a community group demanded at
an April 23 meeting.
Members of the local watchdog
organization the Gowanus Canal
Community Advisory Group
voted to pass a resolution demanding
that the city’s Gowanus rezoning
does not compromise the
cleanup effort of the Gowanus
Canal Superfund site by allowing
for taller buildings and more
people, according to one member,
who noted that city and federal
officials have yet to even agree
on whether to mitigate combined
sewage overflows coming from
the nabe’s current population with
two tanks or a tunnel.
“Zoning goes in and EPA and
DEP are fighting about tank or tunnel
and meanwhile we still don’t
know what we’re doing. It’s just
silly, the whole thing, when you
just step way back to the 30,000-
foot height and look at this,” David
Briggs said at the monthly meeting
of the group at the St. Mary Star
of the Sea retirement home.
A lack of foresight could end up
biting the city in the back, much
like the complex repair issues affecting
the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway,
according to Briggs.
“Don’t do anything that jeopardizes
the cleanup and do the
rezoning so we don’t have the
triple BQE overpass problem 10
years from now,” he said.
The city should also not include
its remediation efforts mandated
under the Federal Superfund
program as sufficient for the
rezoning proposal, because these
measures don’t accommodate for
future population growth, members
demanded.
A senior Department of Environmental
Protection official tried
to take credit for those efforts at
a March 26 meeting , saying that
the city is doing more than it had
to, one member warned.
“One of my biggest concerns
from when DEP was here last
month was that Angela Licata
clearly thinks that they are already
doing way more than they’re
required to do under the Superfund,”
said Andrea Parker. “And
it seems from all the zoning documentation
that’s come out that
they’re just going to say, ‘We’re
already building the tanks so we
don’t need to do anything additional.’
I think we already deserve
the tanks, we deserve the flushing
tunnel, pump station — all of
the upgrades that we’ve already
been promised should not be part
of this package.”
At last month’s meeting , the
group demanded the city halt its
rezoning plans — which would allow
developers to erect 22-story
towers along the banks of the Gowanus
Canal — until the Feds finish
the clean up.
The city already has to ensure
that current and future high density
residential redevelopment does
not compromise the cleanup under
the EPA’s Record of Decision
on the Superfund site, a spokeswoman
for the federal agency told
the organization, adding that the
feds would come back every five
years to check on their city counterparts.
“We come back every five
years and review the remedy to
Cleaning the
Gowanus
See GOWANUS on page 15
Flower power
Cosplayer Jon Rios showed up as Deadpool during the cherry blossom festival at
Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Read more on page 13.
Photo by Caroline Ourso
/BROOKLYNPAPER.COM