Category Archive for : ‘LONG ISLAND NEWS’

The Parents For Megan’s Law and Childhood Sexual Abuse Prevention Center marked their opening in Stony Brook last week.  Attending were Suffolk County Executive Robert Gaffney, state Senator James Lack and county legislators.  With the help of $196,000 in county and state funds, the information clearinghouse and resource center moved into its new home, a four-office suite in a Stony Brook strip mall on Nesconset Highway.  Laura Ahearn, the center’s founder and executive director, provided those services out of her Stony Brook home for the past two years.  It started

A Suffolk County man turned from Acting Supreme Court Justice Michael Mullen yesterday, discreetly pumped his fist and walked from the Riverhead courtroom, free at last and free for good from charges that he raped his own daughter 15 years ago when she was just 8.  He spent more than a dozen years in prison after a jury convicted him in 1988 of first degree rape and sodomy.  He was sentenced to 12 1/2 to 25 years in prison.  The US Second Circuit Court of Appeals threw out the conviction

Kurt Rasmussen, a 48-year-old auto body repairman, was arrested on charges of first-degree sodomy, third degree sexual abuse, three counts of unlawful dealing with a child and three counts of endangering the welfare of a child.  He would repair bicycles for neighborhood children and let them sit on his motorcycle.  But in the past year he had developed relationships with several children that no one knew about.  He would by them alcohol and cigarettes and then eventually lured them into his home to watch pornographic videos.  The charges stem from

D, 16, filed charges against her father when she was 12, and on March 18 last year he was convicted by a jury of second degree rape, sexual abuse and endangering the welfare of a child.  The rape was part of a pattern of abuse she said that started at age 8.  Fifteen months have passed since her father was convicted and on July 31, Suffolk County Court Judge John Mullin gave her father the maximum prison term of 2 1/3 to 7 years.  But, her father has yet to

Charles Bodenburg, 20, molested, beat and smothered 3 year old Kayla Zachman to death while baby-sitting her and her infant brother.  Bodenburg was the boyfriend of Kayla’s mother.  Kayla’s grandmother said she could track Kayla’s fear of Bodenburg back around Memorial Day weekend, when he started baby-sitting regularly since the mother had started working.  The mother said, She cried.  She didn’t want me to leave her with him.

Bodenburg’s initial story was that his girlfriend’s young daughter died from drinking too much amaretto.  The version of events he gave later

A Manhattan federal appeals court overturned an award of $900,000 to Steven Arnold, a convicted rapist who said correction officers at the Nassau County jail failed to protect him from a severe beating by other inmates.  The 1999 award was overturned by a three-judge panel of the Second US Circuit of Appeals.  A new trial was ordered on the grounds that the US District Court judge hearing the case, Frederic Block, had improperly allowed the jury to determine the meaning of the working of state law on jail staffing rather