Public Safety

Prompted by growing numbers and a spate of attacks against African immigrants, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr.  is forming an African Advisory Council.

FDNY Chief Brad Walls surveyed the facade of the Whitestone Shopping Center as his firefighters from Battalion 47 approached the flamed-filled Lollipops Diner.

Before the firefighters could turn their hoses on the blaze, the restaurant’s front window melted and the fire jumped to the awning. The overhang burst into flames and rained melted plastic onto the sidewalk like a fire-laden waterfall.

Concerned for his firefighters’ safety, Walls pulled back the battalion.

As children and their parents walked past crowded restaurants on Roosevelt Ave. in Jackson Heights recently, men yelled “Chicas!” and handed out cards with phone numbers and pictures of busty, scantily clad women.

For Kika Cerpa, a woman in her mid-30s, those cards bring back memories of her harrowing ordeal as one of those “chicas.”
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Where’s my pancakes, read Rodney Bradford’s Facebook page, in a message typed on Saturday, Oct. 17, at 11:49 a.m., from a computer in his father’s apartment in Harlem.

At the time, the sentence, written in indecipherable street slang, was just another navel-gazing, cryptic Facebook status update — words that were gobbledygook to anyone besides Mr. Bradford.

But when Mr. Bradford, a skinny, short 19-year-old resident of the Farragut Houses, was arrested the next day as a suspect in a robbery, the words took on a level of importance that no one in their wildest dreams — least of all Mr. Bradford — could have imagined. They became his alibi.

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