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DOVER — The Woodman Museum has hired as a new executive director to lead the 102-year-old institution on Central Avenue. |
David Tompkins started his new career on Thursday after the board of trustees chose him out more than 35 candidates. |
While Tompkins, 59, has called Dover home for him and his family for the past 16 years, he has spent many of those years working in other parts of the country. His new five-minute commute is perhaps one of his favorite aspects of the job, allowing him to spend much more time with his family and lead an organization he ... |
The Kansas City, Kansas, native comes to the Woodman Museum with more than 30 years of senior executive experience that has been mostly focused in the performing arts. For much of this century, Tompkins has overseen and turned around many non-profits, such as the Boston Ballet, Ballet Arizona, Modesto Symphony Orchestr... |
In these roles, he’s helped restructure their organizations, retire debt and create a sustainable business model, Tompkins said. His career has brought him to 14 cities in 11 states. Tompkins said his turnaround rate is 100 percent, but making those turnarounds reality led to burnouts along the way. In addition to his ... |
Tompkins is spending this week reading through old files and getting a better understanding of the museum. Then he plans to get out, meeting community members and conduct a listening tour to learn how they see the Woodman and where they would like to see it go. |
Tompkins first public introduction comes this Friday at the Cochecho Arts Festival. Head Woodman trustee Dave Dupont and his company Dupont’s Service Center are sponsoring the headlining act as well as raffling off a set of Michelin tires with proceeds benefiting the Woodman. Tompkins will be there to say hello, which ... |
While Tompkins has lived in the city for years, he said he only knows a handful of people well. “There are parts of me that know Dover and there parts of me that don't know Dover at all,” he said. |
Tompkins said he has a love of history that makes him feel home at the Woodman. He also wants to use his background to promote arts and culture at the museum, a key aspect in the founding of the museum that started in 1916 from a trust established by Annie E. Woodman. |
Tompkins said his time living around the country in many cities drives home how special the Woodman is. “It’s a cultural jewel, and we’re lucky to have it,” he said. |
One of his goals is to remind those who have lived in Dover for years who haven’t been to the museum in years to return. Another is to let newer residents of the Garrison City know about the museum and how unique it is. |
Mike Day, the museum’s operation director, agreed. He said the museum is often called the “hidden jewel” of the city. One key goal for the Woodman is to drop the “hidden” part, Day said. |
Tompkins takes over the position that has been vacant since January when Elizabeth Fisher’s year term ended as part-time executive director. Fisher had filled the position after the museum’s first executive director, Wes LaFountain, left in Dec. 2016, less than two years after he took the job. |
Invincea, a midsize cybersecurity firm based in Fairfax City, Va., said Wednesday morning it is being bought by Sophos, a British cybersecurity firm, in a deal that could be worth up to $120 million. |
The deal keeps the 90-person firm in Fairfax City and also coincides with a spinoff of Invincea Labs, an arm of the company that holds at least 20 research and development contracts with the Department of Defense. |
John Backus, a partner at the venture capital firm New Atlantic Ventures and one of Invincea’s earliest investors, said the company wasn’t looking for a buyer but jumped at the chance when Sophos offered what was seen as a good deal. Invincea would receive $100 million with a chance to collect another $20 million conti... |
“Sophos made us a good offer and, when someone makes you a good offer, sometimes it’s hard to say no,” Backus said. |
The core technologies of both companies focus on some form of “endpoint” protection designed to automatically deny hackers access. These sorts of automated fixes, like firewalls or anti-virus programs, have gone out of style lately in favor of solutions that track hackers’ movements. In recent years, Invincea has built... |
For Sophos, a company that is publicly traded on the London stock exchange, Invincea is the latest in a stream of acquisitions designed to build out a comprehensive set of corporate security fixes. Invincea’s commercial business targeting big corporate customers is expected to complement Sophos’s solutions, which are g... |
The buyout makes Invincea the latest in a string of D.C.-area cybersecurity outfits to cash out after taking money from local investors, contributing to a small but growing software product industry here. |
Tenable Network Security, which recently raised $250 million in a deal that partially bought out its founder, sells a platform designed to help corporations quickly scan for holes in their networks. Other transactions involved Mandiant and Sourcefire, which sold for $1 billion and $2.7 billion, respectively. Both cyber... |
Buyouts like this are seen as a coup for the local technology ecosystem because the founders tend to stay and invest in new companies, and Invincea’s board is packed with local investors. In its early days, the firm benefited from taxpayer-funded seed investments through the CIT GAP Funds program. The company’s first b... |
Local economic development boosters seem heartened by Sophos’s decision to keep the small company in Northern Virginia. Under the terms of the deal, Invincea will keep its name and remain in Fairfax City and slowly integrate its engineering team with that of Sophos. |
Fathom trips will cost about $1,540 per person with seasonal variations. Russell said Boise will be the home base for herself and five or six Fathom employees. |
Carnival hopes to soon expand its social-impact traveling options beyond the Dominican Republic, she said. |
Russell founded Create Common Good in Boise in 2009. The nonprofit provides job training in agriculture and food preparation to people who face barriers to employment, including refugees, homeless people, convicts, former addicts and women referred by the Women’s and Children’s Alliance. |
Russell and her husband, Jeff Russell, founded the Boise bookkeeping firm Easy Office that became Jitasa, which provides accounting services to nonprofits and has grown to 85 employees. She also has worked for General Motors, Nike and Intel. |
The father of a star high-school athlete confronts New York City’s patterns of violence. |
Tayshana Murphy, whom everyone knew by her nickname, Chicken, hoped to win a basketball scholarship and become the first member of her family to get a college degree. |
On the evening of September 10, 2011, Taylonn Murphy took the subway to West Harlem to visit his eighteen-year-old daughter. He found her sitting on a bench, joking with her friends, in front of the building where she lived with her mother. “I need to talk to you,” he said, as he walked past her into the lobby. “When y... |
His daughter’s name was Tayshana—she had been named for him—but everybody knew her by her nickname, Chicken. She had hazel eyes, a contagious grin, a powerful build, and, on the inside of her right forearm, a tattoo of a basketball, with the words “It’s not a game, it’s my life.” She had missed the prior season, after ... |
Chicken lived with her mother, her two brothers, her sister, and her sister’s baby, in a fifteenth-floor apartment at 3170 Broadway, just below 125th Street, near where the subway emerges onto an overhead track. The building is part of a large public-housing project called the General Ulysses S. Grant Houses, situated ... |
Shortly after four o’clock the next morning, he awoke suddenly to hear his sixteen-year-old son, Taylonn, Jr., shouting, “They just shot Chicken!” Outside the apartment, Murphy heard screams coming from the stairwell. He ran down eleven flights, and found Chicken lying in a pool of blood in the hallway. Her sister, Tan... |
She had, in fact, died almost immediately, after being shot three times, in the wrist, the hip, and the chest. A few hours later, a worker from the city medical examiner’s office placed Chicken’s body into a canvas bag and wheeled her out of the building on a gurney. Her mother walked alongside, one hand clutching the ... |
In the days after the shooting, Murphy stayed at the apartment, answering calls from friends, relatives, coaches, school officials, and reporters. Weeping teen-agers came by at all hours, and Murphy did his best to comfort them. More than a hundred surveillance cameras monitor the Grant Houses, and soon the police had ... |
A wake was held at 6 p.m. on September 16th, at a funeral home in Queens, not far from the Queensbridge Houses, the project where Chicken had lived between the ages of three and fourteen. Murphy expected a few hundred mourners, but Chicken had been known throughout the city, and some three thousand people came. Teen-ag... |
The burial was the next day, in New Jersey, and afterward the family attended a vigil that a friend organized in Queensbridge. Several hundred young people, holding white candles, stood around the perimeter of the basketball court where Chicken had played nearly every day of her childhood. Murphy had grown up playing b... |
The next morning, before he could decide, a detective called: the suspects had been found, in Columbia. They were extradited to New York, and arraigned in a courthouse downtown. From their photographs, Murphy had assumed that they were “real killers and gangsters.” But, when he saw them, he says, “These guys were babie... |
Murphy had never thought much about how to stop the disproportionately high rates of violence in certain parts of the city, but now he could think of almost nothing else. Last year, there were three hundred and thirty-three homicides in New York City, the lowest number of any year on record. But almost twenty per cent ... |
Taylonn Murphy stands at the spot where his daughter was killed, in a hallway of the Grant Houses, in West Harlem. |
Murphy began speaking often with Yahmadi and soon started following his example. Six weeks after Chicken’s murder, he attended a vigil in Brooklyn for Zurana Horton, a mother of thirteen, who had been killed by stray gunfire after picking up her eleven-year-old daughter from school. In February of 2012, a police office... |
He frequently had trouble sleeping, and he spent hours at night making lists of the problems that he saw—“violence,” “poverty,” “P.T.S.D. in the community.” Then he researched them on the Internet, and typed up ideas about how to fix them, including more counselling for children and teens traumatized by violence. He sk... |
She told him that, whenever she tried to talk to her boyfriend about their son’s death, he fled the room. The police had arrested two teen-age boys for Lloyd, Jr.,’s murder, and, when Norman had to go to court, Murphy went, too. One day, at the courthouse, he met Lloyd Morgan, Sr. He seemed angry and not interested in ... |
Murphy was born in the Queensbridge Houses, but, when he was four, his father, a Vietnam veteran who worked as a prison guard, moved the family into Lindsay Park, a middle-income housing complex in Williamsburg. In his junior high school, Murphy was in a gifted program, as was Jay Z, whom everyone knew as Shawn Carter,... |
Murphy had not been nearly as focussed on basketball as Chicken had, but he was good enough to play for August Martin High School, in South Jamaica, Queens, which had a strong team. This was in the mid-eighties, and South Jamaica was the center of the city’s crack-cocaine trade. Murphy started selling marijuana in his ... |
He was charged with both weapons possession and murder and was taken to Rikers Island. Six months later, he was still there, awaiting trial, when he met Tephanie Holston, the friend of another inmate’s girlfriend, in the visiting room. She was nineteen then, and, Murphy recalls, she was “gorgeous inside and out.” She l... |
Silberblatt, who worked for the Legal Aid Society, believed that Murphy was not guilty and that his first two trials had been “a farce.” He shared his doubts with the prosecutor, and worked out a deal in which Murphy would plead guilty to second-degree manslaughter. Murphy still maintained his innocence, but he agreed ... |
A judge sentenced him to one to three years and, with time served, he was released in April, 1992. On May 4, 1993, Chicken was born. If not for those two hung juries, Murphy, instead of having a daughter, might have spent decades in a penitentiary upstate. That’s what happened to his friend Derrick Hamilton; he was con... |
When Murphy was a child, everybody called him Yummy, because he loved to eat. His favorite food was chicken, and when Tayshana was a baby he called her Chicken Wings, later shortened to Chicken. She first picked up a basketball at age three, and by six she could dribble a ball between her legs. She learned how to play ... |
By then, Chicken had moved to the Grant Houses with her mother and her siblings. Murphy couldn’t afford his own place, so he usually stayed with his mother or his brother, both of whom still lived in Lindsay Park. When Murphy had been on Rikers Island, the prosecutor’s plea deal had seemed like a get-out-of-jail-free c... |
Ron Artest, who then played for the Los Angeles Lakers, had grown up in Queensbridge. He funded Triple Threat, the travelling team Chicken had played for, and he paid her tuition when she entered high school. But Murphy still had to pay for her sneakers, school uniforms, and supplies, and the expenses for the travellin... |
Chicken transferred to another Catholic school, and then, after her sophomore year, enrolled at Murry Bergtraum, a public high school in lower Manhattan, which had one of the top girls’ basketball programs in the country. But she tore her A.C.L. before the season started, while playing in a tournament. After her surger... |
Forty-five hundred people live in the nine brick towers that make up the Grant Houses. The Manhattanville Houses, with six buildings, are home to three thousand people. According to the New York City Housing Authority, the average household income for both projects is twenty-four thousand dollars a year, and nearly for... |
For decades, the Grant and Manhattanville Houses had been embroiled in a feud. As in other projects, some young people joined “crews.” The Grant crew called itself 3 Staccs; Manhattanville’s was the Make It Happen Boys. The crews were not affiliated with established gangs, like the Bloods or the Crips, and their disput... |
After Chicken’s death, every time Murphy visited the Grant Houses he was besieged by grieving teen-agers, who called him Pops, slapped palms with him and hugged him, sometimes resting their heads on his shoulder. Some of Chicken’s friends were angry; many appeared depressed. They asked him why they should bother trying... |
Last May, in Queensbridge Park, at a picnic to mark what would have been Chicken’s twenty-second birthday, her sister, Tanasia, shows a tattoo commemorating her. |
In the spring of 2013, Tyshawn Brockington became the first of the two murder suspects to go on trial. He had a prior arrest for assault, and, according to prosecutors, he belonged to the Manhattanville crew. Murphy and Tephanie Holston attended every day of the trial. Hakiem Yahmadi, Shianne Norman, and the parents of... |
For the first time, Chicken’s parents heard the full story of their daughter’s murder. That day, dozens of young people from Grant and Manhattanville had been fighting. Brockington was assaulted, and that night a large group from Grant attacked Robert Cartagena on 125th Street. Chicken was on the street and watched the... |
She didn’t attend every day of the trial. “I couldn’t take it,” she says. “It made me mentally and physically sick.” She saw Chicken’s parents in the courtroom and wanted to speak to them, but she didn’t know what to say, or whether they would even want to hear from her. After the trial, Derrick Haynes, a Harlem commun... |
Haynes had closely followed Tyshawn’s trial; he himself had grown up in the Manhattanville Houses, and, a month before the shooting, he had coached Tyshawn in a basketball tournament. No one is certain how the trouble between Manhattanville and Grant began, but Haynes says that it dates back to at least 1972, when he w... |
Friends at the picnic wear laminated pictures of Chicken. |
Since Chicken’s death, the violence in Grant and Manhattanville had grown worse. A sixteen-year-old was shot in the shoulder, a twenty-one-year-old was shot in the leg, and at least three bystanders were hit. Taylonn, Jr., was still living in the Grant Houses with his mother, and during this time he acquired a rap shee... |
At the same time, the neighborhood was rapidly gentrifying. Double-decker tour buses frequently drove by the projects, and passengers took pictures of the residents. “It’s like they’ve never seen people before,” Arnita Brockington said. Meanwhile, a sleek, nine-story glass block, designed by Renzo Piano, was rising rig... |
Two doors down from the office was a shuttered storefront, with a faded sign that read “Flerida Beauty Salon.” Murphy and Haynes discussed trying to take over the space and convert it into a crisis center. In the meantime, they began walking through the projects with Arnita Brockington. In the Grant Houses, people aske... |
At the end of the picnic, friends and relatives released lanterns over the East River. |
Early on the morning of June 4, 2014, the thrum of helicopter rotors could be heard throughout West Harlem. Police Commissioner William Bratton tweeted a picture of himself standing on a street corner, surrounded by officers, with the caption “With members of the #NYPD Gang Division & Chief of Patrol this AM in West Ha... |
The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance, Jr., had secured the indictments of a hundred and three young men, all of whom were allegedly members of three neighborhood crews: 3 Staccs, the Make It Happen Boys, and Money Avenue, which was based a few blocks east, on Manhattan Avenue. A press release from Vance’s of... |
Four years earlier, shortly after Vance took office, he had created the Crime Strategies Unit, and prosecutors had zeroed in on West Harlem as a “violent crime hot spot.” Now they alleged that, since the start of 2010, the three crews had been responsible for two murders, at least nineteen nonfatal shootings, and about... |
The indictments reflected a strategy, favored by Vance’s office and the N.Y.P.D., to build conspiracy cases that rely heavily on social media. For the West Harlem case, police and prosecutors had scrutinized more than a million social-media pages, and eavesdropped on thousands of inmate phone calls. The indictments wer... |
Murphy learned about the raid at around 6 a.m., when he got a call from Derrick Haynes. He was devastated to discover that his son was among those indicted. At the time, Taylonn, Jr., was already in jail; four months earlier, he’d been arrested in connection with an assault. Now he and thirty-five others—all alleged me... |
Meanwhile, the topic of police-community relations had become front-page news, following the deaths of Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner. Students at Columbia began inviting Murphy to speak on campus. George Joseph, now a senior, who has written articles for The Nation and The Intercept, says, “Ever... |
Compared with some of the protesters, Murphy had a more nuanced view of the police. If not for the efforts of law enforcement, his daughter’s killers would still be at large. (He referred to the period after she had been murdered and before her killers were caught as “the longest ten days of my life.”) Besides that, hi... |
In January, nearly eight months after the raid, Manhattan prosecutors filed a new criminal case, charging four young men—all alleged members of 3 Staccs—with the murder of Walter Sumter. One of the accused was Taylonn, Jr. In court papers, prosecutors laid out their theory: Sumter had been a member of the Money Avenue ... |
Prosecutors persuaded the judge to join the murder case with the gang-conspiracy case, arguing that the alleged crimes were related. This is not an unusual practice; combining major felony charges with conspiracy charges can make convictions easier to obtain. And if, as sometimes occurs, a jury acquits a defendant of m... |
Hi Mr Murphy I know we don’t know each other but I used to play ball with your daughter my name is Rayah Feb 1 2015 I lost my young cousin Christopher Graham. It made the news. If you’re free Monday at 9 am his funeral is at Unity. I would really appreciate your uplifting wise words. |
Graham, who was twenty-two, had been shot in the head after performing at a rap show in the Bronx. Rayah thought that Graham’s friends would need to hear “real stuff” at his funeral, and she remembered Murphy, whom she had heard speak three years earlier, at the funeral of a friend. |
Taylonn, Jr.,’s latest legal troubles had not deterred Murphy from continuing his work. On the morning of Graham’s funeral, he attended another court date for his son, then took the subway to the Unity Funeral Chapel, in Harlem. By the time he arrived, the crowd was spilling out the door, and the pastor was finishing u... |
He spoke briefly, then ended as he always did: “I love you all.” A few feet away, a young man popped the cork on a bottle of pink Moët & Chandon, sprinkled some on the ground in Graham’s honor, and then passed it around to his friends, who quickly finished it. |
In early June, almost two years after Murphy and Derrick Haynes had started talking about opening a crisis center, they obtained a lease to a six-hundred-square-foot storefront on Old Broadway, in a building that belonged to the city. It wasn’t the former beauty shop but an abandoned social club next door, where local ... |
In the year since the raid, there had been one homicide in the projects, but, according to the N.Y.P.D., it was unrelated to the feud. Of the hundred and three defendants charged in the conspiracy case, eighty-one have pleaded guilty; three were convicted at trial; one was acquitted; and the rest are waiting for their ... |
After checking that neither boy had an open warrant, the police released them, and the block grew calm again. Murphy shook his head. “Everyone else in their right mind would say, ‘You can’t pay me enough to deal with this headache,’ ” he said. But later that afternoon he planned to walk through the Grant Houses, to fin... |
Soon after the raid, the district attorney’s office had started a youth-sports program in Manhattanville, but Murphy and Haynes believed that much more was needed. They hoped to offer job training, G.E.D.-prep courses, and parenting classes. Murphy had already set up a “first responder” team, made up of two mothers who... |
Ritchie Torres is a rising star who represents a Bronx district on the New York City Council. His job is about to get a lot harder. |
WOW! If you are looking for privacy, some land, a gorgeous pond view and plenty of room - I've got what you are looking for! Come on in and take a tour with me! Inside you will find an open plan, the family room is open to the dining room and the huge kitchen with an island and a HUGE breakfast bar. Granite counters, 5... |
I resent the intent of Haines City officials to include CRA (Community Redevelopment Agency) members' names on plaques to be affixed to buildings currently being erected on the site of the former Oakland Elementary and Oakland High schools. |
In fact, I resent having city officials' names being placed on any of these facilities. When officials substituted their wishes and desires in lieu of the compassionate pleas of a number of former Oaklanders and community residents, they forfeited this recognition. |
Although it is being disguised, this is the same selfish, despicable and contemptible group that sacrificed historical treasures in the historically black community of Oakland to erect trophies in their names. This act on their part is repugnant and scandalous. |
Those who demonstrate a lack of the prerequisite sophistication, refinement and cultivation to recognize the accumulated intrinsic value of historically significant structures and geographical sites, effectively forfeit their opportunity to hold elected office. The have often demonstrated that they are not fit for offi... |
The structures being erected to allegedly replace the Oakland cafetorium and gymnasium will never replace nor acquire the status of the buildings that were so foolishly razed. |
Those who officials pandered to also have culpability. They also deserved to be ostracized. Their continued gullibility foster and promote absurd and incompetent actions by officials. It is always reasonable and prudent to consult with those who are better positioned to provide competent guidance than to blindly suppor... |
This CRA board notwithstanding, city officials' names do not deserve to be affixed to sanitation trucks. |
Haines City's CRA is a template for conflict of interest and fraud. The entire City Commission hold seats on the CRA board. The commissioners' presence on this board not only gives an appearance of conflict of interest, it is a real conflict of interest. |
CRA funds are to be used exclusively for blighted and low-income communities. With exception of Southern Dunes, all of Haines City is eligible for CRA funds. This is ridiculous and represents a fraud on the entire city of Haines City. |
This represents a back-door and despicable redirection or channeling of CRA funds to affluent and undeserving areas and neighborhoods. |
We have been reporting on the rise of some really nasty diseases caused by tick bites - everything from Lyme disease to Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Well, now a new study is shedding light on an old technique to repel ticks that many people don't use. It is a repellent that you spray on your clothing and not on your s... |
ALLISON AUBREY, BYLINE: Back in the 1980s, the U.S. military tested the use of a pesticide derived from the flowering chrysanthemum plant to protect soldiers from insect and tick bites. It's called permethrin, and now decades later, many outdoor enthusiasts use it, including Danny Quinteros. |
DANNY QUINTEROS: I love being outside, whether it's hiking, backpacking, climbing. |
AUBREY: He's got a plan to hike the Appalachian Trail, which cuts through many tick-infested areas, so he's got a can of permethrin, and he's about to spray it on a T-shirt. |
QUINTEROS: What you want to do is to stay back 6 to 8 inches away from the clothing. |
AUBREY: He applies an even coat, then flips it over to spray the back. |
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