• The Newtown Creek body count continues: A man wearing a hospital bracelet was found dead in the North Brooklyn waterway earlier this month, just a week after another body was “found floating on Newtown Creek,” as QNS reports. Back in July, local DJ Reda Briki was discovered dead on a houseboat; in May artist Oren McNeill, who also made the creek his home, passed away on his own houseboat. These local deaths continue a morbid trend over the past few summers, when three bodies were discovered over the course of 2023-24, triggering rumors of a serial killer, though rejected by the NYPD.  

• Bodega violence: Two employees at the Royal Deli & Grill on Knickerbocker Avenue made local headlines last week when they allegedly beat an unruly customer to death, described by the New York Post as “a 59-year-old Bushwick local with more than two dozen busts on his rap sheet.” The Royal Deli employees were briefly held by police but were quickly released and secured representation from Fernando Mateo, founder of United Bodegas of America, an advocacy group who formed a ‘secret society’ called SecSoc to train and arm bodega workers in 2023. UBA recently announced plans to install panic buttons in 500 bodegas.

• ICE in Bushwick: According to several online ICE Watch accounts, apparent ICE or other kinds of federal agents apparently took two people in Bushwick last week, over on the corner of Harman Street and Irving Avenue. The continuing presence of chaotically organized, cryptically coordinated raids in US cities sets an uneasy stage for incidents like the one on August 22nd, where a man was tased and almost abducted by four men posing as FBI agents on Wilson Avenue. The group drove away before police could arrest them. 

• In Rochester, on the other hand, an ICE raid in progress was disrupted by a crowd of protestors who slashed their tires and called them ‘Gestapo’.

• Last week, 11 New York politicians, including local state reps Julia Salazar and Emily Gallagher, were arrested and then released at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan for attempting to inspect the ICE holding facilities there. More optimistically, the Indypendent has a story out last month interviewing local various Zohran Mamdani supporters, calling part of Northern Brooklyn the “Commie Corridor.”  

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