Police & Courts

A 40-year-old East Hampton man is facing multiple charges stemming from a Friday night incident that was witnessed by two children.

He was having a panic attack and didn't know what to do, Daniel Campbell wrote in a seven-page statement to police a few hours after he struck Devesh Samtani, 18, of Hong Kong, while driving on a dark but crowded road in Amagansett to drop off his sister and her friends at a huge house party on Aug. 10. Mr. Campbell said he had not consumed alcohol or drugs, which police confirmed while interviewing him at his family's house on Second House Road in Montauk.

A hit-and-run incident on Collins Avenue in East Hampton, a short street that connects Accabonac Road to North Main Street, was reported shortly after 3 p.m. on Aug. 18.

The spray paint was intentional, an employee at Harper's Books told police on Friday afternoon, after a traffic control officer called in what at first looked like graffiti on the plywood boards that were installed over the building's windows by way of storm preparation.

An East Hampton man was charged after crashing his 2007 Toyota pickup truck, which was heavily damaged, on Abraham's Path near Town Lane in Amagansett at 10:05 p.m. He told police he'd dropped some food he was eating, causing him to lose control of the truck and strike a tree and a fence.

Suffolk County Supreme Court Justice John B. Collins ordered a more detailed investigation last Thursday of the Jan. 13 hit-and-run accident that killed Yuris Murillo Cruz, who was walking with her children on Montauk Highway in Amagansett when Mark A. Corrado Jr. of West Babylon, driving a borrowed pickup truck, struck them and fled the scene.

At 5 a.m. on Saturday, East Hampton Town police charged Nelson Pardo of Port Jefferson, 41, with criminal trespassing. The charge is a misdemeanor when a person tries to enter a fenced-off property, in this case a garage on Long Lane, East Hampton. He was arraigned here the next morning before Justice Steven Tekulsky. 

The teenage victim of an Aug. 10 hit-and-run in Amagansett died on Friday from head injuries sustained in the accident. 

On the afternoon of Aug. 9, "an  unknown subject moved a small outside table from the backyard to the front stoop" of a Dunemere Lane house and "dumped a small garbage bag of seashells on the stoop as well," according to the police report.

Two men were charged over the weekend with drunken driving on local roads.

There was cause for concern on Egypt Beach near the Maidstone Club on Monday afternoon when a beachgoer realized that a swimmer had been gone for more than 45 minutes and was no longer in sight. As it turned out, the man was not in distress but an experienced ocean swimmer who goes in almost every day. Still, what followed put recent interagency training to the test and, said Drew Smith, Chief of East Hampton Village Lifeguards, was "a huge success." 

South Fork police are on alert after eight overdoses linked to the same batch of fentanyl-laced cocaine resulted in six deaths on Shelter Island and in Southold last week.

A few more details have emerged regarding an accident reported here last week, in which Paul Brennan of Sagaponack had to be extracted from his 2020 Land Rover after a near head-on collision on Stephen Hand's Path near Two Holes of Water Road, East Hampton.

Too many cars are not reacting to silent blue or green flashing lights in fire and ambulance volunteers' vehicles the same way they would to a siren, said East Hampton Fire Department Chief Gerard Turza, and this summer is worse than ever, because, he suggested, the pandemic has attracted more people unfamiliar with how local emergency services operate.

Four recent accidents on local roads ended in charges of driving while intoxicated against all four motorists, according to East Hampton Town police.

A teenage driver who reportedly fled the scene of an accident late Tuesday night that left a pedestrian with serious injuries was arrested a few hours later, at 2:40 a.m. yesterday, at his home in Montauk.

A 78-year-old woman who lives on King's Point Road in Springs was arrested on Aug. 3, charged with menacing with a weapon and criminal mischief with intent to cause injury, misdemeanors. 

A handwritten note showed up in an Orchard Lane resident's mailbox on July 29 saying that her pool pump was broken, that it was very loud, and requesting that she turn it off. The next day an unknown person entered her backyard and unplugged the pump. A repair company was to have arrived last week.

Drugs were allegedly involved in at least two arrests last week.

The manager of an East Hampton restaurant asked a diner early Saturday evening "to put on shoes, because the restaurant had a shoe policy. He refused and proceeded to seat himself," according to the police report. He left before an officer arrived, but filed a separate report, saying that "he was with his 93-year-old mother in a wheelchair when the manager told him that he was not wearing the right footwear for the establishment and had to leave." He told police he "felt slighted and thought the manager was rude and unreasonable in that he has been a 40-year-customer."

A stranger found inside a Cove Hollow Road house on the afternoon of July 28 was later charged with criminal possession of a weapon, East Hampton Village police reported this week.

It was "one of those things," said Pat McKibbin, the owner of Mary's Marvelous in East Hampton, speaking of a flood in the kitchen on the afternoon of July 27 that resembled "a miniature of Niagara Falls."

An almost-head-on crash late Wednesday morning in East Hampton Town left one driver pinned in his car while the other was able to free himself before first responders arrived on the scene.

Two bicyclists, one of them a teenager who was later treated at Stony Brook Southampton Hospital, were hit by cars in recent weeks.

East Hampton Town police stopped three allegedly unlicensed drivers last week, two in Montauk and the third in East Hampton.

When Julie Sweeney opened her ice cream wagon for the day at Ditch Plain Beach on the morning of July 15, "she saw a box of chips had a hole in it, and it was empty." Upon further inspection, she found a hole in a plexiglass window. "It appears that once the window was pried open, the unknown subject(s) slid their hand inside and stole the chips from said box," police reported. An officer found remains of the chips on the floor of the men's bathroom adjacent to the trailer.

An accident in East Hampton Village at 5 p.m. last Thursday tied up traffic for a while in the vicinity of North Main Street by Hook Mill Road.

The East Hampton Town fire marshal's office found a treadmill's electrical cord to be the cause of a fire on the morning of July 20 that "totaled" a Springs house. The treadmill was in the basement, and the electrical cord had been caught under one of its legs.

Kenneth Kalbacher of East Hampton was attacked by four men in the parking lot of Amagansett Square, leaving him with a fractured orbital eye socket and broken nose, said police. They were still looking for the assailants earlier this week.

Police did a thorough sweep of Montauk party spots last week, leading to five arrests.