New York
Mourners Pay Tribute to O’Shae Sibley at the Scene of His Murder
Hundreds of mourners gathered on Friday at the Brooklyn gas station where O’Shae Sibley, a 28-year-old dancer and choreographer, was fatally stabbed last weekend after a dispute over his vogueing in its parking lot.
They chanted Mr. Sibley’s name while carrying Pride flags and posters that read “Vogueing is resistance.” At the foot of the gas station sign, some of them left shrines made up of lit candles, flowers and photographs of Mr. Sibley dancing.
As evening fell, L.G.B.T.Q. activists and dancers took the megaphone to pay tribute to Mr. Sibley, who was gay and Black and whose murder has been charged as a hate crime.
Neko Old Navy, a ballroom dancer, recalled Mr. Sibley’s entry into the ballroom scene when he was a youngster in Philadelphia. Gia Love, a model and transgender activist, said of vogueing: “It’s how a lot of us have found ourselves. It’s how a lot of us have affirmed ourselves when the world has not accepted us.”
Qween Jean, the founder of the advocacy group Black Trans Liberation, said: “Vogueing is not a crime. So today we will vogue in honor of O’Shae.”
In the moments before his death, Mr. Sibley and four friends stopped at the Mobil station on Coney Island Avenue after a day at the beach. They were vogueing to Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” album when they were confronted by a group of young men who told them to stop dancing and hurled gay and racist slurs. One of them pulled a knife and stabbed Mr. Sibley. His apparent attacker, a 17-year-old Brooklyn resident whose name has not been revealed, turned himself in to the authorities on Friday. He was charged with second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon.
Vogueing, an exuberant dance style that makes use of fashion models’ runway poses, emerged in the Black and Latino queer underground ballroom scene of the 1980s. Mr. Sibley, a Philadelphia native who moved to New York a few years ago with aspirations of pursuing a dance career, found a community in the city’s contemporary ballroom circuit.
Friends at the vigil said that he was associated with ballroom families including the House of Old Navy and the House of D’Mure-Versailles, and that he could reliably be found vogueing along Pier 46 in Manhattan and at clubs like 3 Dollar Bill in East Williamsburg, where he was a daunting adversary. He had recently started preparing to audition for a part in “The Lion King.”
Mr. Sibley’s death has unnerved and energized the city’s gay community. Memorials have been held for him at the Stonewall Inn and at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community Center in Greenwich Village.
At the gas station on Friday night, mourners turned their grief into an act of empowerment as they vogued through the streets in Mr. Sibley’s name.
The sky had darkened and a light rain had begun to fall when someone cried out: “Pump the beat!”
A speaker blasted Beyoncé’s “Pure/Honey,” and an impromptu runway formed within the crowd. Men in muscle shirts strutted down the path with hard stares. Others struck poses and dipped to dance along the ground. Wearing crimson gloves and red platform heels, the drag performer Kevin Aviance entered the fray, vogueing ferociously to applause.
One of the dancers was Otis Pena, a close friend of Mr. Sibley who was present during the stabbing. Mr. Pena helped stanch Mr. Sibley’s bleeding before he was taken to Maimonides Medical Center. Beaded with sweat, he wore red track pants as people danced nearby.
“Pioneers and icons of ballroom have come out to pay their respects to O’Shae tonight, and that’s beautiful,” Mr. Pena said. “Vogueing is the dance of our people. It’s a dance of rebellion created by us and for us.”
“When you walk a ball, there’s a special moment you know everyone is looking at you,” he continued. “Ever since what happened, tonight is the first time I’ve felt a little joyful — and O’Shae would have wanted that.”
The procession made its way through the Midwood neighborhood, with participants vogueing past a kebab restaurant and a yeshiva. When it came to a halt outside an entrance to a Kings Highway subway station, the dancing hit a fever pitch.
One dancer stopped traffic to vogue between a bus and an ice cream truck. Others threw down their hardest moves while a circle of mourners chanted Mr. Sibley’s name one last time. Someone carried a tray of burning sage through the crowd as police officers monitored the scene.
Moments later, the mourners dispersed.
Kristian Miranda, who goes by Krissy Versace on the ballroom circuit, wiped away tears.
“I felt the loss of my friend tonight,” he said. “But vogueing out here like this with everyone, I also finally felt some sense of empowerment over what happened. I vogued proudly in the name of O’Shae.”
Today would have been the first Monday of New York City’s congestion pricing plan. Before it was halted by Gov. Kathy Hochul, the plan was designed to rein in some of the nation’s worst traffic while raising a billion dollars for the subway every year, one toll at a time.
A year’s worth of tolls is hard to picture. But what about a day’s worth? What about an hour’s?
To understand how the plan could have worked, we went to the edges of the tolling zone during the first rush hour that the fees would have kicked in.
Here’s what we saw:
Video by Noah Throop/The New York Times; animation by Ruru Kuo/The New York Times
You probably wouldn’t have seen every one of those cars if the program had been allowed to proceed. That’s because officials said the fees would have discouraged some drivers from crossing into the tolled zone, leading to an estimated 17 percent reduction in traffic. (It’s also Monday on a holiday week.)
The above video was just at one crossing point, on Lexington Avenue. We sent 27 people to count vehicles manually at four bridges, four tunnels and nine streets where cars entered the business district. In total, we counted 22,252 cars, trucks, motorcycles and buses between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. on Monday.
We wanted to see how the dense flow of traffic into the central business district would have generated money in real time.
Though we can’t know that dollar amount precisely, we can hazard a guess. Congestion pricing was commonly referred to as a $15-per-car toll, but it wasn’t so simple. There were going to be smaller fees for taxi trips, credits for the tunnels, heftier charges for trucks and buses, and a number of exemptions.
To try to account for all that fee variance, we used estimates from the firm Replica, which models traffic data, on who enters the business district, as well as records from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and city agencies. We also made a few assumptions where data wasn’t available. We then came up with a ballpark figure for how much the city might have generated in an hour at those toll points.
The total? About $200,000 in tolls for that hour.
Note: The Trinity Place exit from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, which would have been tolled, is closed at this hour.
It’s far from a perfect guess. Our vehicle total is definitely an undercount: We counted only the major entrances — bridges, tunnels and 60th Street — which means we missed all the cars that entered the zone by exiting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive or the West Side Highway.
And our translation into a dollar number is rough. Among many other choices we had to make, we assumed all drivers had E-ZPass — saving them a big surcharge — and we couldn’t distinguish between transit buses and charter buses, so we gave all buses an exemption.
But it does give you a rough sense of scale: It’s a lot of cars, and a lot of money. Over the course of a typical day, hundreds of thousands of vehicles stream into the Manhattan central business district through various crossings.
Trips into tolling district, per Replica estimates Note: Data counts estimated entrances on a weekday in spring 2023. Source: Replica.
Queens-Midtown Tunnel
50,600
Lincoln Tunnel
49,200
Williamsburg Bridge
27,900
Manhattan Bridge
24,000
Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel
23,100
Queensboro Bridge
21,700
Brooklyn Bridge
17,100
Holland Tunnel
15,400
All other entrances
118,000
Total
347,000
The tolling infrastructure that was installed for the program cost roughly half a billion dollars.
The M.T.A. had planned to use the congestion pricing revenue estimates to secure $15 billion in financing for subway upgrades. Many of those improvement plans have now been suspended.
Methodology We stationed as many as five counters at some bridges and tunnels to ensure that we counted only cars that directly entered the tolling zone, not those that would have continued onto non-tolled routes.
Our count also excluded certain exempt vehicles like emergency vehicles.
We used estimates of the traffic into the district to make a best guess at how many of each kind of vehicle entered the zone. Most of our estimates came from the traffic data firm Replica, which uses a variety of data sources, including phone location, credit card and census data, to model transportation patterns. Replica estimated that around 58 percent of trips into the central business district on a weekday in spring 2023 were made by private vehicles, 35 percent by taxis or other for-hire vehicles (Uber and Lyft) and the remainder by commercial vehicles.
We also used data on trucks, buses, for-hire vehicles and motorcycles from the M.T.A., the Taxi and Limousine Commission and the Department of Transportation.
For simplicity, we assumed all vehicles would be equally likely to enter the zone from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. as they would be in any other hour. We could not account for the other trips that a for-hire vehicle might make once within the tolled zone, only the initial crossing. And we did not include the discount to drivers who make under $50,000, because it would kick in only after 10 trips in a calendar month.
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Jury Deliberation Re-charge
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
-
PART: 59
Χ
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
4909
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 30, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR., ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
GEDALIA STERN, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates, RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK CRIMINAL TERM
-
THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK,
PART: 59
Indict. No.
71543-2023
CHARGE
-against-
DONALD J. TRUMP,
DEFENDANT.
BEFORE:
4815
FALSIFYING BUSINESS
RECORDS 1ST DEGREE
JURY TRIAL
X
100 Centre Street
New York, New York 10013
May 29, 2024
HONORABLE JUAN M. MERCHAN
JUSTICE OF THE SUPREME COURT
APPEARANCES:
FOR THE
PEOPLE:
ALVIN BRAGG, JR.,
ESQ.
DISTRICT ATTORNEY, NEW YORK COUNTY
One Hogan Place
New York, New York 10013
BY:
JOSHUA STEINGLASS, ESQ.
MATTHEW COLANGELO,
ESQ.
SUSAN HOFFINGER, ESQ.
CHRISTOPHER CONROY, ESQ.
BECKY MANGOLD, ESQ.
KATHERINE ELLIS, ESQ.
Assistant District Attorneys
BLANCHE LAW
BY:
TODD BLANCHE, ESQ.
EMIL BOVE, ESQ.
KENDRA WHARTON, ESQ.
NECHELES LAW, LLP
BY: SUSAN NECHELES, ESQ.
Attorneys for the Defendant
SUSAN PEARCE-BATES, RPR, CSR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
LAURIE EISENBERG, RPR, CSR
LISA KRAMSKY
THERESA MAGNICCARI
Senior Court Reporters
Susan Pearce-Bates,
RPR, CCR, RSA
Principal Court Reporter
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