The City Finds $2.1 Billion For A Train Stop At That Convention Center But Can’t Figure Out How To Provide Working Elevators At Bronx Family Court*

Sure, the project is a lot less “sexy” but it at least provides some useful purpose:

There are many longstanding, seemingly intractable shortcomings in the city’s family court system that might delay a parent in getting a child back from foster care: unprepared lawyers, overcrowded dockets and long waiting lists for drug treatment and mental health services.

But Bronx Family Court has added a new obstacle: broken elevators.

For about a year, the elevators at the courthouse have been a disaster, people who work there say. Breakdowns have long been routine. This year, repair work has only added to the problem.

Lines to use a working elevator can stretch around the corner. People sometimes wait for hours to get to hearings, which are held on the seventh and eighth floors. Frequently, hearings have to be postponed because clients and witnesses cannot get to them.

“It’s absolutely an outrage,” says Ava Gutfriend, a lawyer who often represents parents in child welfare cases. “But in the Bronx it happens all the time.”

In some cases, warrants have even been issued for people who are downstairs waiting for an elevator; judges know only that they are not in the courtroom, said Bill Nicholas, the assistant attorney in charge of the Legal Aid Society’s office at the court.

. . .

In a city full of aging towers, many people view elevator breakdowns as a common annoyance of life. But the scale of the waiting at Bronx Family Court, which often extends to an hour or more, is beyond what most New Yorkers face. And the potential loss is not simply that of time wasted, but of the quality of justice that is dispensed. Consider the case of a client of Ms. Gutfriend’s who was scheduled for a hearing in mid-November to determine whether she could get her daughter back from foster care, where the child had been for 10 months.

The hearing was set for 10 a.m., Ms. Gutfriend recalled, but it was a day when only two of the four elevators in the building were working. The lines to get on the elevator and up to the hearing rooms stretched back two city blocks. Her client phoned upstairs to let her know she was stuck in the line, but was not able to get upstairs in time.

The judge agreed to call the hearing again an hour later, but the client was still in line. So the judge, who had something like 70 other cases to try that day, rescheduled the no-shows for the next available date. For this mother, the next chance to plead her case and get her child back was in January.

*I don’t care if it’s a reductionist apples-oranges argument — this is horrifying.

If Anything Can Cast A Pall Over A Funeral . . .

. . . it’s as situation like this:

As a throng of mourners converged on Staten Island yesterday to remember the life of one of the Fire Department’s “rising stars,” the specter of his murder seemed to loom over an already grim occasion.

In the morning chill, the crowd of firefighters, police, family and friends gathered around St. Charles R.C. Church in Oakwood watched with tearful eyes as the flag-draped casket of Supervising Fire Marshal Douglas Mercereau was pulled from a waiting hearse. But many of those in attendance — including about a dozen plainclothes police officers — also cast suspicious glances at his widow, Janet Redmond-Mercereau, the sole suspect in the slaying of the 38-year-old Oakwood man.

And while sobbing echoed inside the semicircular chapel, several of those in attendance noted that Mrs. Redmond-Mercereau sat dry-eyed and stonefaced as her husband was eulogized by his brother, Thomas; his boss, Supervising Fire Marshal Louis Garcia, and Monsignor Thomas Bergin, who’d been his principal at Monsignor Farrell High School.

“It made me uncomfortable,” said Westerleigh resident Fran Hogan, a friend of the Mercereau family who attended the funeral yesterday, in respect of the suspicions swirling around Mrs. Redmond-Mercereau.

“But this was about Doug, and we stayed focused on that. The family wanted to give him a respectable, dignified funeral, and we did that,” Ms. Hogan added.

Late 911 Wears The Late Crown

Not gruesome, just sad:

The skeletal remains of a reclusive elderly woman, fully clothed as if she’d been about to go out, were found in her Brooklyn home yesterday — two years to the month since neighbors last reported seeing her.

Christina Copeman, 70, was found lying on her side in the second-floor hallway of the three-story building she owned on East 92nd Street in East Flatbush.

Her nephew, Peter Bishop, said she was wearing a heavy coat, a hat and a scarf.

Altea Bishop said she believed her sister had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease.

“She kept to herself, like a hermit,” she said. “She didn’t bother her neighbors. She wouldn’t answer the door.”

An employee at the city Medical Examiner’s Office said the body had decayed to the point where Copeman was mostly bone.

“She was past decomposing; she was totally gone,” the city worker said. “She’d been dead a long time. It wasn’t gruesome; it was just sad.”

Neighbors said they last saw Copeman alive in December 2005 — and they claimed that they called 311 and 911 numerous times, but that nothing happened.

Peter Bishop, 35, a Staten Island limo driver, said he finally filed a missing-person report after failing to get results from calling the cops, calling his aunt, and knocking on Copeman’s door.

“We called the police all the time,” he said. “They would come, but they wouldn’t do anything.”

Yesterday, the police — this time, armed with the missing-person report — forced open the door to Copeman’s home and came across her body.

They also found a 4-foot-high stack of mail.

Makes You Want To Boot, To Boot

The obvious thought — look for the employee missing a foot — failed to find a match when it came to this gruesome discovery:

A Con Ed diver vacuuming out an electrical power bay at the utility’s Astoria plant on November 21 found a human foot inside a worker’s boot, police said.

An agency spokesperson said the diver was cleaning out the bottom of a bay at Shore Boulevard and 20th Avenue at about 10:30 a.m., when he was shocked to find the boot- with a foot in it.

“Something jammed the vacuum,” police sources said. “The diver picked up the item and put it in a salvage bag. When he surfaced and looked into the bag, he saw the boot. When he looked inside the boot he saw the foot. The guy was more than a little shaken up.”

. . .

Police sources said a check of accident and other incident reports at the Astoria plant over the past 10 years failed to provide any leads to investigators probing the incident.

Stray Cat Hunt For JFK Cats

Hey man, that’s that — the Port Authority plays the role of the shoe-throwing mean old man and leaves it to the imagination who the “proper authorities” may be:

To the alarm of cat rescue groups, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has started rounding up feral cats that live in a colony deep in the secured cargo areas of Kennedy International Airport. The several dozen cats have been tended for years by sympathetic airport employees.

The cats sleep in makeshift cubicles made of plastic packing containers nestled in cargo carts that once carried transcontinental luggage but have been long retired from Kennedy’s runways. They gather under and around a rusted old fuel tanker truck.

“It’s just a happy cat camp,” said Ashot Karamian, president of the Urban Cat League, which specializes in rescuing stray cats in New York and whose members had visited the site in the past.

But now the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which manages the airport, has blocked cat rescue groups from approaching the cats.

“The cats are being rounded up in the coming days, and will be held in a safe place until they’re turned over to the proper authorities,” Pasquale DiFulco, an authority spokesman, said yesterday.

. . .

Yesterday morning, there were piles of food on foam plates held down with stones next to an old British Airways cargo crane. Jet engines roared nearby and the AirTrain glided silently by.

A woman in an airline uniform appeared and began opening cans of food and dumping the contents onto paper plates. She refused to be photographed or to discuss the cats for fear of causing problems with her employer.

Scruffy cats dashed out of old cargo equipment, rusted snowplows and underbrush to eat the food.

Each year scores of dogs and cats are lost and found on Kennedy’s 5,000 acres. Some pets that are being transported may get loose. Also, people who live locally can easily drive onto airport property and get rid of their pets, and travelers facing exorbitant kennel costs may opt to simply abandon their pets before catching their planes. Some animals wander in from nearby.

Mr. Karamian, 49, estimated that there were hundreds of feral cats across the airport. He said volunteers from his group had trapped and then spayed or neutered perhaps 30 cats from the colony in the past few months, but lately had been told they must stay off airport property.

“These cats reproduce and kill rodents,” he said. “But someone keeps trapping and killing them. We want to stop the slaughter.”

Buried lede: people actually abandon their cat at the airport before that big trip to Bermuda . . . wow.

Location Scout: JFK.