Lawsuit, High-Speed Chase, Lottery, Indie Film: Top Bloomfield Stories of the Week

A Bloomfield man was hospitalized Friday after a high-speed car chase involving local and state police ended in a crash on Broad Street and Bay Avenue. 

After an alleged shoplifting incident in Paramus, a man led police on a wild, high-speed chase down the Garden State Parkway, getting off at the Bloomfield exit and crashing into a black Silverado truck belonging to a Bloomfield resident.  The victim was transported to HackensackUMC Mountainside Hospital with chest and neck injuries.  The suspect fled and was captured by law enforcement officers in a neighbor’s yard.

A woman who lives near the scene of the accident said the man climbed her fence and ran through her property.  “He looked at me and we made eye contact,” she recalled, shaken.  “If he’d had a gun he might have killed us.”

New Jersey Developer Cary Heller has filed an appeal after his 2011 lawsuit against the township was thrown out of court in May, said Bill Colgan, Principal Developer of Metro Real Estate Development Corporation. 

The redevelopment of Bloomfield Center has languished for years awaiting the outcome of a series of legal challenges, Heller’s lawsuit being the most recent.  Colgan, noting that Heller waited the maximum amount of time before filing the appeal, noted, said, "I believe [Heller's] motivation is truly him taking out his aggression on the town, trying to penalize the people of the town.  He is singlehandedly responsible for stalling progress of the town development for another 1-2 years."

The case is headed for Appellate Court next, though not date has been set. 

To read the court document detailing the appeal, click  

The owner of a seemingly lucky grocery store on North Broad Street and West Passaic Avenue that sold a said every time a big winning ticket is sold he loses a customer.

When asked why, Vinnie Patel, owner of the Krauszers/Yogi Grocery, said the winner doesn’t like to give the store a tip afterward, a traditional practice among lottery winners.

“It doesn’t matter if we don’t get a tip,” he insisted.  “I just don’t like losing customers.”

Patel’s nephew Abahishek Barvalia, who also works in the store, agreed that a big lottery win usually means a vanishing customer.  “After they win money they retire.  And then we never see them again.”

Bloomfield filmmaker Daniel Glick's new documentary, A Place to Stand, tells the astonishing story of convict-turned-poet Jimmy Santiago Baca, whose life of brutality and despair was redeemed by art.  

 An excerpt from Baca’s bestselling memoir, A Place to Stand, reads:

“When the mind says, ‘I am human’, the heart growls, ‘I am an animal.’  The only thought that drives you on is to be alive at the end of the day, and to be a man, or die fighting to prove you are a man.  That’s the code of the warrior.”

Patch:  What impact do you feel your film will have on people?

Glick:  We want the film to change lives.  It unquestionably has the ability to do that.

Glick is currently raising funds to support the project through Kickstarter.com 

For more information on the film, go to:
www.aplacetostandmovie.com