Northeast
Ellen Greenberg prosecutors say they can't prove crime in 'suicide' by 20 stab wounds
A Pennsylvania district attorney made a major announcement in its outside investigation into the case of 27-year-old Ellen Greenberg, a Philadelphia teacher whose 2011 death was ruled a suicide after her fiancé found her in the kitchen during a blizzard with 20 stab wounds, half of them from behind.
Her parents, Dr. Josh and Sandee Greenberg, have been entangled in court battles with the government since their daughter’s untimely death. They have accused the medical examiner’s office of covering up their daughter’s homicide, demanded police turn over more evidence and tried suing to have the designation of “suicide” on her death certificate replaced with “homicide” or “undetermined.”
The Chester County District Attorney’s Office announced Friday morning that it has conducted its investigation, and prosecutors are “currently unable to move forward with criminal charges.” They are moving Greenberg’s case to an “inactive” status in Chester County but are leaving it open to re-examine if they get new information.
After re-interviewing key people in the original Philadelphia investigation, consulting an independent forensic expert and taking other investigatory steps, “Chester County’s investigative team determined that, based on the current state of the evidence, we cannot prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime was committed,” the office said.
JUDGE TIED TO ELLEN GREENBERG’S FIANCÉ TOOK ITEMS FROM HER ‘SUICIDE’ SCENE BEFORE POLICE SEARCH
The knife found piercing the chest of 27-year-old Philadelphia teacher Ellen Greenberg has never been fingerprinted, according to the attorney for her parents, who are suing city officials over an alleged cover up of her death.
The DA’s office noted that there is no statute of limitations for criminal homicide, said that the case would remain open and, therefore, investigators would “not be answering any questions about this matter.”
The DA’s office met with Greenberg’s parents and their attorney on Thursday to share the news before announcing it to the public.
“They didn’t go very deeply into the case…they really didn’t come up with anything new,” Dr. Josh Greenberg told Fox News Digital.
“Our conviction about Ellen having been murdered does not change due to the announcement by the Chester County District Attorney’s Office,” Greenberg family attorney Joseph Podraza said in a press release he provided to Fox News Digital.
“Admittedly, the investigation conducted by the Chester County District Attorney’s Office was extremely limited and constrained. The Office told us that they did not investigate the core issues which we have raised which establish Ellen was murdered, and that evidence remains unchallenged,” Podraza continued.
“The independent forensic expert who they said they consulted during the course of the investigation was similarly bounded by his own limited background, an undergraduate degree in entomology (the study of insects) and a masters in criminal justice, but no medical school training, nor any training in the specialty of forensic pathology, both of which are necessary in order to competently assess the evidence uncovered in this case to date.”
The Chester County District Attorney’s Office initiated an independent investigation roughly two years ago, after both Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner and former Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, now the governor, both recused themselves from the case.
Krasner had previously worked with Greenberg’s parents as part of his private practice, and Shapiro previously denied having “an actual conflict” but acknowledged the “appearance” of one.
When Shapiro was the attorney general, a spokesperson told Fox News Digital that not only his office undertook “an exhaustive review and conducted new forensic analysis” – but also that new expert testimony and information had been withheld from investigators.
“These unfortunate limitations and constraints notwithstanding, we do appreciate the District Attorney’s professional courtesy of speaking with the family and candidly acknowledging all these limitations and constraints,” Podraza added. “We also point out that another highly experienced homicide prosecutor while employed at the Philadelphia DA’s Office conducted his own independent review of this case, thoroughly investigated all the issues surrounding Ellen’s death, and reached the opposite conclusion, that Ellen was murdered.
Ellen Greenberg in an undated family photo. (Greenberg family)
“We now look forward to an upcoming trial where a full and forthright examination of the core issues surrounding Ellen’s murder may be publicly conducted before an independent judge and jury of our peers.”
In September, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments from the Greenbergs and their attorney.
“The Supreme Court is going to be deciding whether or not Sandee and I have standing. And that’s a real big thing … I mean, no one has ever gotten this far. … I know it’s taken almost 14 years, but it’s still a very important case,” Dr. Greenberg previously told Fox News Digital.
Greenberg was found on Jan. 6, 2011 with 20 stab wounds, including 10 from behind, at least one of which could have been inflicted after she was already dead, according to court documents. Her body was also covered in bruises in different stages of healing, which her parents say are consistent with abuse.
WATCH ‘TEACHER DEATH MYSTERY’ ON FOX NATION
At the time of her death, Greenberg and her fiancé, Sam Goldberg, had recently sent out “save-the-dates” for their upcoming wedding. Her body was found in the kitchen near a half-made fruit salad on the countertop.
After her death, a forensic pathologist with the city medical examiner’s office, Dr. Marlon Osbourne, ruled it a homicide, according to court documents. Then he reversed course after meeting with police behind closed doors and deemed it officially a suicide.
Greenberg’s parents and experienced outside investigators have raised concerns that police botched their response to her death and released the scene too early. They have also questioned why Goldberg’s uncle, James Schwartzman, was allowed to remove a number of items from the scene.
TEACHER’S UNLIKELY ‘SUICIDE’ RULING CALLED OUT AS WEB SLEUTHS DIG INTO SURVEILLANCE VIDEO
This crime scene photo shows damage to Ellen Greenberg’s apartment door after her fiancé, Sam Goldberg, told police he kicked it in from the outside. (Tom Brennan)
“Things were removed from the crime scene without our permission. The chain of custody was broken from the very beginning when Jim Schwartzman removed computers, electronics, my daughter’s handbag,” Dr. Josh Greenberg previously told Fox News Digital.
A representative for Schwartzman, a distinguished judge in Pennsylvania, responded to these claims on his behalf, saying police gave him permission to go in and take Greenberg’s belongings. He denied removing her handbag, but he admitted to removing her computers and cellphones.
“The door was damaged and unsecure, and he took out items that he thought might be stolen,” the representative for Schwartzman previously explained to Fox News Digital on his behalf. He added that Schwartzman did not need the permission of Greenberg’s parents to take anything from the apartment once police released the scene.
‘SUICIDE’ RULING FOR TEACHER’S 20 STAB WOUNDS MAY BE REEXAMINED AS FAMILY SECURES POTENTIAL MAJOR WIN
WATCH: Melissa Ware discusses cleanup at Ellen Greenberg’s apartment
Neither Goldberg nor Schwartzman have been charged with any wrongdoing in relation to Greenberg’s death.
Philadelphia police did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment. They have previously declined to discuss the case, citing the open investigation in Chester County and the ongoing civil litigation.
Goldberg and the Chester County District Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond for comment.
“I very much look forward to being able to have our voices heard,” Sandee Greenberg said. “Not only are we fighting now for justice for Ellen, but because there’s so much attention on these different lawsuits, it will set some precedent, hopefully, for other victims of heinous crimes.”
Read the full article from Here
New York
She’s Riding in Five Boro Bike Tour, and She’s Happy to Wear a Helmet
Good morning. It’s Friday. We’ll meet a first-time rider in the Five Boro Bike Tour who learned the hard way that wearing a helmet matters. And on this, the 95th anniversary of the day the Empire State Building opened, we’ll find out about some of the workers who built it.
As a first-timer in the Five Boro Bike Tour on Sunday, Patricia Hochhauser will wear a helmet. It’s a must for the 32,000 entrants.
But Hochhauser has special reason to. She wasn’t wearing one a couple of years ago, when she tried out a gas-powered scooter. Her husband, Harold Hochhauser, said it had bucked and thrown her off. She sustained a traumatic brain injury.
“I live every day with the consequences of not wearing that helmet,” she said. She was checking out the scooter in a parking lot. “I was so excited about it, thinking I was going to do errands in the neighborhood — put on a backpack and throw my groceries in there,” she said. “I had all these big hopes and dreams.” She said she did not remember anything about the accident “until they were putting staples in my head” — 15 in all, she said.
The accident cost her a job opportunity, she said: She had been scheduled to start training a week later as a bus driver with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. She had been a school bus driver and was looking forward to getting behind the wheel of one of the 1,300 buses in the M.T.A.’s fleet.
On Sunday she is looking forward to riding over the 2.6-mile-long Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. The lower level will be closed to cars and trucks to accommodate the cyclists, who will start out at Franklin Street and Church Street in TriBeCa in Manhattan. Some avenues and major highways will also be off limits to cars and trucks at times during the tour. The City Department of Transportation’s traffic advisory is here. And the Five Boro Bike Tour does not permit scooters like the one she was riding when she had the accident. Some e-bikes are allowed. She plans to ride her regular road bike.
‘We are Gen X’
When the accident happened, Hochhauser and her husband were already practiced cyclists and owned helmets. But they never bothered with them, she said.
Why not?
“Because we are Gen X, and I grew up not having to wear a helmet,” she said. “Half the time growing up, I didn’t even have to wear a seatbelt in the car. It wasn’t like, Oh, get in the back seat and buckle up, you know?”
After the accident, she was determined to ride again. Harold Hochhauser said that their first outings were difficult. To help her maintain balance, he put training wheels on her bike — since removed, he said.
Last year they rode in the Tour de Yonkers, picking the 50-mile route, the longest of three that participants could follow. She said there were hills that she could not conquer — she had to get off and walk up.
“I’m doing it all myself this time,” she said. “I am, you know, stronger than I was then.”
Weather
Today will be bright and sunny with a high near 65. Expect increasing clouds and a chance of rain tonight, as temperatures fall near 51.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until May 14 (Solemnity of the Ascension).
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“I would probably encourage him to return the Koh-i-Noor diamond.” — Mayor Zohran Mamdani, on what he would have said to King Charles III if they had met privately during the royal visit on Wednesday. The priceless jewel is a symbol of colonial plunder.
The workers who built the Empire State Building
On another May 1 — in 1931, by coincidence also a Friday — the Empire State Building opened, and on that morning, everyone’s perspective changed. People were awed by the view of the building and the view from the building, “a new view” of New York, as The New York Times described it from 85 stories up. The ships in the Hudson River were “little more than rowboats,” the paper reported. Fifth Avenue and Broadway were “slender black ribbons.”
The Times said that 3,400 workers had “coordinated tasks to finish ahead of schedule.” Glenn Kurtz, whose father’s office was in the building, wondered who they were.
“When you look at the standard histories, the answer is always the architects, the owners and the contractors,” Kurtz told me. He wanted to know about the “people who had tools in their hands.”
“I very quickly discovered there was almost no information about them,” he said. There was no list of their names; the men in famous photographs taken by Lewis W. Hine “have invariably been referred to as ‘anonymous workers,’” Kurtz said. He spent a decade doing research for the book “Men at Work: The Empire State Building and the Untold Story of the Craftsmen Who Built It” and put names to some of the faces in Hine’s photos.
He spotted 32 names on a plaque in the lobby — for workers who were given “certificates of superior craftsmanship” — and realized that many were the men in Hine’s photographs.
But the images themselves were why the workers’ identities had been overlooked. “The photographs are iconic, they represent a generalized ideal, and we love generalized ideals,” Kurtz said. To say, ‘Oh, that’s not this magnificent, iconic image of a worker, it’s Victor Gosselin, who lived in Canada and died in a car crash’ — many people would feel it diminishes the image to know who the actual person was.”
Or, as he said a moment later, “the actual lives of these men often undermine the mythology.”
Gosselin was almost certainly a Mohawk from the Kahnawake reservation, whose territory once reached what is now upstate New York. Another, George Adams, was apparently distantly related to the second president of the United States, John Adams. Others were recent immigrants from Ireland and Italy, as well as Eastern Europe and Scandinavia. Some were sons or grandsons of German or Scottish immigrants.
In “Men at Work,” Kurtz described Neil Doherty, an ironworker Hine photographed, as one of the few “allowed to have his own voice” in newspaper articles about the construction of the huge skyscraper.
“It’s just like anything else,” Doherty was quoted as saying in one article. “A person on solid ground never has any fear of falling. That’s just the way you become, up on the girders after a while, and you have to watch yourself taking that attitude. Usually the two days off at the end of the week are enough to take away this carelessness.”
Gosselin was “the single best-known worker on the building” because he was photogenic and charismatic, Kurtz said. “And in every portrayal of him, he epitomizes the cultural ideal that has so powerfully shaped our image of the workmen who built the Empire State.“
“My real question was, What does the building stand for?” Kurtz told me. “One way to think of it is as a central symbol of America in the 20th century. If we imagine it in those terms, do we think of the five rich men who were funding it, or do we think in terms of the 10,000 mostly immigrant men who built it? The story of the five is told over and over again. I thought it would be interesting to tell the other story.”
METROPOLITAN diary
Covered up
Dear Diary:
I was walking down Clinton Street on the Lower East Side when I passed a couple of guys sitting on a bench.
“You look like you’re in a witness protection program,” one said.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“You look like you’re in a witness protection program, for sure,” he repeated.
Boston, MA
With Jayson Tatum out, Celtics debut brand-new starting lineup in Game 7
With Jayson Tatum unavailable, Celtics head coach Joe Mazzulla threw his starting lineup into a blender for Game 7 against the Philadelphia 76ers.
Boston opened Saturday’s win-or-go-home game at TD Garden with a five-man unit of Derrick White, Ron Harper Jr., Baylor Scheierman, Jaylen Brown and Luka Garza.
White and Brown are longtime starting-lineup staples, and Scheierman, Harper and Garza all started games at different points this season. But this was that quintet’s first time sharing the floor. They’d played zero minutes together during the regular season or postseason.
Harper, Scheierman and Garza were part of Boston’s top-performing lineup in Game 6. Those three, along with Payton Pritchard and Jordan Walsh, staged a late-game rally, cutting a 23-point deficit to 12 before losing steam in the final minutes of Philadelphia’s series-extending 106-93 win.
The trio of new additions also played key roles in one of the Celtics’ most memorable wins of the season: the Game 82 matchup with the Orlando Magic that Boston won despite sitting their top seven rotation players. Harper, Scheierman and Garza combined for 84 points in that win, with Garza hitting the decisive 3-pointer late in the fourth quarter.
Scheierman and Garza have seen sporadic playing time in Boston’s first-round playoff series, but Harper — who only had his two-way contract converted to a standard deal last month — had only played in blowouts before his surprise start on Saturday.
The radical lineup change pushed usual starters Neemias Queta and Sam Hauser to the bench. Queta had started 81 of the 82 games he’d played this season, including each of the first six playoff games, but he’s struggled to stay out of foul trouble against the Sixers. The Celtics were outscored with Hauser on the floor in four of the first six postseason contests.
Mazzulla opted for Garza over veteran center Nikola Vucevic, who has been Queta’s primary backup when healthy.
Tatum was ruled out for Game 7 with left knee tightness.
Pittsburg, PA
Highbrow vs. lowbrow: Pittsburgh Opera fronts fat jokes in season-ending comedy, ‘Falstaff’
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