Story by Beaver County Radio News Staff. Published August 1,2023 12:22 P.M.  

(Beaver, PA) The Fort McIntosh Chapter NSDAR held their 6th annual fundraiser event Saturday, July 30 with 74 people in attendance.  According to Fort McIntosh Chapter Regent, Deanna Jacobs, the theme was the 250th Anniversary of the Boston Tea Party and they called it “The Beaver Tea Party.”  Attendees wore Revolutionary War-Era dress and reenactors who were in attendance from Fort McIntosh Garrison, provided a Muzzle demonstration. Jacobs said, “We threw tea and stamped letters into spoons, and had an amazing time.”

The chapter estimates they raised over $1,500 to support their activities, all while educating guests about the events of the Boston Tea Party.  The funds raised are used to support active military, veterans, education, and historic preservation projects throughout Beaver County.

PITTSBURGH (AP) — A jury is set to deliberate whether to impose the death penalty or a sentence of life in prison without parole on a man who spewed antisemitic hate before fatally shooting 11 worshippers at a synagogue in the heart of Pittsburgh’s Jewish community.

The same jurors who convicted 50-year-old Robert Bowers in June on 63 criminal counts listened to closing arguments Monday in the penalty phase of his federal trial, held nearly five years after the truck driver from suburban Baldwin perpetrated the deadliest attack on Jews in U.S. history.

The extent to which mental illness and Bowers’ difficult childhood played a role in the massacre dominated the lawyers’ arguments for and against capital punishment. The jury is expected to get the case and begin deliberations on Tuesday.

Speaking for the government, U.S. Attorney Eric Olshan said Bowers was clearly motivated by religious hatred when he entered the Tree of Life synagogue on Oct. 27, 2018, and opened fire with an AR-15 rifle, shooting everyone he could find.

The gunman raved incessantly on social media about his hatred of Jewish people — using a slur for Jewish people some 400 times on a platform favored by the far right — and remains proud that he killed Jews, the prosecutor reminded jurors.

“Do not be numb to it. Remember what it means. This defendant targeted people solely because of the faith that they chose,” Olshan said.

He added: “This is a case that calls for the most severe punishment under the law: the death penalty.”

Bowers’ lead defense attorney, Judy Clarke, acknowledged the horror of his crimes but urged jurors to opt for mercy and a life sentence.

Bowers’ attorneys have argued that he has schizophrenia, a serious brain disorder whose symptoms include delusions and hallucinations, and that Bowers attacked the synagogue out of a delusional belief that Jews were helping to bring about a genocide of white people by coming to the aid of refugees and immigrants. On Monday, Clarke recounted Bowers’ history of psychiatric hospitalizations, including an extended stay in a residential juvenile mental health program.

The defense also presented evidence of Bowers’ difficult childhood.

“What has happened cannot be undone. We can’t rewind the clock and make it that this senseless crime never happened. All we can do is make the right decision going forward. We are asking you to make the right decision, and that is life,” Clarke said in her closing argument.

A life sentence would mean that “prison is where Mr. Bowers will die in obscurity, not as a hero and not as a martyr,” she said.

Olshan, the prosecutor, disputed the defense experts’ diagnosis of schizophrenia, asserting that Bowers was not suffering psychosis but had chosen to believe white supremacist rhetoric. And while acknowledging that Bowers was a depressed, neglected child, Olshan downplayed the significance of it, noting that Bowers had held jobs, paid bills, and was an otherwise functioning adult.

“He was not a child, he was a grown man. He was responsible for his actions, not his family and things that happened decades earlier. He was, he is responsible for his actions,” Olshan said.

Clarke retorted that “childhood matters.”

“It defies reality to say he got better, he’s fine, he’s just an evil guy. What it does is reflects a complete misunderstanding of serious mental illness,” she said.

In order to impose death, jurors must find that aggravating circumstances, which make the crime especially heinous, outweigh mitigating factors that could be seen as diminishing his culpability. Those aggravating circumstances could include the vulnerability of Bowers’ elderly and disabled victims and his targeting of Jewish people.

Olshan played a composite of 911 calls made from inside the synagogue, including audio of people being shot and a survivor’s horrified screams.

He said Bowers had taken “11 people, 11 full lives, 11 people who loved their families, 11 people who loved their friends, 11 people who were loved. … How do you measure the impact of all of that loss?”

The prosecutor spoke about 75-year-old Joyce Fienberg’s care for her family and 65-year-old Richard Gottfried’s devotion to his faith. He said Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz, 66, had the ethos of a country doctor: “He loved delivering babies but he never delivered judgment.” David Rosenthal, 54, and Cecil Rosenthal, 59, intellectually disabled brothers, “loved life,” Olshan said. “But maybe more than anything, they loved Tree of Life.”

The other deceased victims were Rose Mallinger, 97; Bernice Simon, 84, and her husband, Sylvan Simon, 86; Dan Stein, 71; Melvin Wax, 87; and Irving Younger, 69.

The attack also wounded seven people, including five responding police officers. Bowers was shot three times before surrendering when he ran out of ammunition.

(Photos provided by New Sewickley Police Department) 

(New Sewickley Twp.) The New Sewickley Township Police Department is asking for the publics help in identifying an individual after he broke into and robbed the Little Super Convenience store. The store, is located at 824 Route 989 in New Sewickley
Township.

New Sewickley Township Police reported via release that on Sunday July 30, 2023, at approximately 4:20 AM an unidentified black male, (pictured below) forcibly entered the store and stole money and cigarettes. The unidentified black male is believed to be from the Edgewood/Swissvale area.
The New Sewickley Township Police Department is requesting that anyone with
information on the identity of this male call the New Sewickley Township Police
Department at 724-774-2473. See Photos of the suspect below: (Provided by New Sewickley Police Department)

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Paul Reubens, the actor and comedian whose Pee-wee Herman character — an overgrown child with a tight gray suit and an unforgettable laugh — became a 1980s pop cultural phenomenon, has died at 70.

Reubens, who’s character delighted fans in the film “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” and on the TV series “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” died Sunday night after a six-year struggle with cancer that he kept private, his publicist said in a statement.

“Please accept my apology for not going public with what I’ve been facing the last six years,” Reubens said in a statement released Monday with the announcement of his death. “I have always felt a huge amount of love and respect from my friends, fans and supporters. I have loved you all so much and enjoyed making art for you.”

Created for the stage, Pee-wee with his white chunky loafers and red bow tie would become a cultural constant in both adult and children’s entertainment for much of the 1980s, though an indecent exposure arrest in 1991 would send the character into entertainment exile for years.

The staccato giggle that punctuated every sentence, catch phrases like “I know you are but what am I” and a tabletop dance to the Champs’ song “Tequila” in a biker bar in “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure” were often imitated by fans, to the joy of some and the annoyance of others.

Reubens created Pee-wee when he was part of the Los Angeles improv group The Groundlings in the late 1970s. The live “Pee-wee Herman Show” debuted at a Los Angeles theater in 1981 and was a success with both kids during matinees and adults at a midnight show.

The show closely resembled the format the Saturday morning TV “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” would follow years later, with Herman living in a wild and wacky home with a series of stock-character visitors, including one, Captain Karl, played by the late “Saturday Night Live” star Phil Hartman.

HBO would air the show as a special.

Reubens took Pee-wee to the big screen with 1985’s “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” which takes the character outside for a nationwide escapade. The film, in which Pee-wee’s cherished bike is stolen, was said to be loosely based on Vittorio De Sica’s Italian neo-realist classic, “The Bicycle Thief.” Directed by Tim Burton and co-written by Hartman, the movie was a success, grossing $40 million, and continued to spawn a cult following for its oddball whimsy.

A sequel followed three years later in the less well-received “Big Top Pee-wee,” in which Pee-wee seeks to join a circus. Reubens’ character wouldn’t get another movie starring role until 2016’s Pee-wee’s Big Holiday,” for Netflix. Judd Apatow produced Pee-wee’s big-screen revival.

His television series, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” ran for five seasons, earned 22 Emmys and attracted not only children but adults to Saturday-morning TV.

Jimmy Kimmel posted on Instagram that “Paul Reubens was like no one else — a brilliant and original comedian who made kids and their parents laugh at the same time. He never forgot a birthday and shared his genuine delight for silliness with everyone he met.”

Both silly and subversive and championing nonconformity, the Pee-wee universe was a trippy place, populated by things like a talking armchair and a friendly pterodactyl.

Director Guillermo del Toro tweeted Monday that Reubens was “one of the patron saints of all misfitted, weird, maladjusted, wonderful, miraculous oddities.”

The act was a hit because it worked on multiple levels, even though Reubens insists that wasn’t the plan.

“It’s for kids,” Reubens told The Associated Press in 2010. “People have tried to get me for years to go, ‘It wasn’t really for kids, right?’ Even the original show was for kids. I always censored myself to have it be kid-friendly.

“The whole thing has been just a gut feeling from the beginning,” Reubens told the AP. “That’s all it ever is and I think always ever be. Much as people want me to dissect it and explain it, I can’t. One, I don’t know, and two, I don’t want to know, and three, I feel like I’ll hex myself if I know.”

Reubens’ career was derailed when he was arrested for indecent exposure in an adult movie theater in Sarasota, Florida, the city where he grew up. He was handed a small fine but the damage was incalculable.

He became the frequent butt of late-night talk show jokes and the perception of Reubens immediately changed.

“The moment that I realized my name was going to be said in the same sentence as children and sex, that’s really intense,” Reubens told NBC in 2004. “That’s something I knew from that very moment, whatever happens past that point, something’s out there in the air that is really bad.”

Reubens said he got plenty of offers to work, but told the AP that most of them wanted to take “advantage of the luridness of my situation”,” and he didn’t want to do them.

“It just changed,” he said. “Everything changed.”

He did take advantage of one chance to poke fun at his tarnished image. Just weeks after his arrest, he would open the MTV Video Music Awards, walking on to the stage alone and saying, “Heard any good jokes lately?” (Herman appearances on MTV had fueled Pee-wee’s popularity in the early 1980s.)

In 2001, Reubens was arrested and charged with misdemeanor possession of child pornography after police seized images from his computer and photography collection, but the allegation was reduced to an obscenity charge and he was given three years probation.

Born Paul Rubenfeld in Peekskill, New York, in 1952, the eldest of three kids, he grew up in Sarasota where his parents ran a lamp store and he put on comedy shows for neighbor kids.

After high school he sought to study acting. He spent a year at Boston University, and was then turned down by the Juilliard School and Carnegie-Mellon University. So he enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts. That would lead to appearances at local comedy clubs and theaters and joining the Groundlings.

“Paul’s contributions to comedy and entertainment have left a lasting impact on the world, and he will be greatly missed by all in the Groundlings community,” the group said in a statement.

After the 1991 arrest, he would spend the decade playing primarily non-Pee-wee characters, including roles in Burton’s 1992 movie “Batman Returns,” the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” film and a guest-star run on the TV series “Murphy Brown.”

He also appeared in the 1999 comedy film “Mystery Men” and Johnny Depp’s 2001 drug-dealer drama “Blow.”

Reubens — who never lost his boyish appearance even in his 60s, would slowly re-introduce Pee-wee, eventually doing a Broadway adaptation of “The Pee-wee Herman Show” in 2010, and the 2016 Netflix movie.

Reubens was beloved by his fellow comedians, and fans of Pee-wee spanned the culture.

“His surreal comedy and unrelenting kindness were a gift to us all,” Conan O’Brien tweeted. “Damn, this hurts.”

(Image/Commonwealth Media Services)
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Pennsylvania will direct up to $400 million in federal money over the next five years to reimburse organizations that train new infrastructure workers on the job, under an executive order signed Monday by Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro.

A portion of the $19 billion that the state will receive from two federal programs for infrastructure projects will, under the governor’s order, fund the new training program.

Organizations doing infrastructure work — such as repairing roads and bridges, replacing lead pipes and expanding high speed internet — could receive up to $40,000 for each new worker they train. A maximum of $400,000 could be reimbursed through the program, which will be managed by the Pennsylvania Department of Labor and Industry.

The grants are meant to reimburse the cost of workers’ salaries and other training costs. Additionally, the money can be used to help employees with housing, child and dependent care, tools, uniforms, educational testing and transportation. The Shapiro administration aims to create 10,000 new jobs.

Shapiro said that reopening a collapsed section of Interstate 95 in Philadelphia in less than two weeks showed “what’s possible when our highly skilled workers get to work and when we have their backs.”

“We need the workforce to be able to do it,” the governor said at a press conference in Pittsburgh. “So one of the biggest hurdles we face is having enough workers trained and ready for these kinds of projects at a time when we now have more money than ever before for this type of investment.”

Photo obtained from Beaver Valley Regional Police Website
Story by Curtis Walsh – Beaver County Radio News Director. Published July 31, 2023 1:48 P.M.

(Baden, PA) Beaver Valley Regional Police released a statement that they are investigating numerous car entries that occurred early Sunday morning between 2am and 3am. According to a press release, all of the targeted vehicles were left unlocked. Beaver Valley Regional Police wants to remind residents to keep their vehicles locked, secure valuables, and report any suspicious activity by calling 9-1-1.  The incidents of Sunday morning are currently under investigation and police ask that any information be forwarded to Beaver Valley Regional Police. The non emergency number for BVRPD is 724-869-9530. You can also contact them by visiting bvrpd-pa.gov. 

Photo of Ambridge charging station by Curtis Walsh – Beaver County Radio
Story by Sandy Giordano – Beaver County Radio with contributions by Curtis Walsh. Published July 31, 2023 12:22 P.M.

(Ambridge, PA) Ambridge has become the first city in the county to install their own electric vehicle charging stations. Borough officials authorized the purchase of electric vehicle chargers earlier this year. 2 are for the public’s vehicles and 2 are for police vehicles. The chargers are located in front of the borough building  and were placed there earlier this month, according to a spokesperson. The first charging station overall in the county was built approximately two years ago in the Beaver County Courthouse parking garage. That charging station is operated by the county and is free for the public.

Story by Sandy Giordano – Beaver County Radio. Published July 31, 2023 12:13 P.M.

(Baden, PA) A Baden Borough official said less than 3,000 residents are affected by the water line break at the Ambridge Water plant. Residents were advised by email and on Facebook about the issue and advised to use bottled water for drinking.

San Rocco Festival 2013 with WBVP/WMBA Pontiac van shown above.
Story by Sandy Giordano – Beaver County Radio. Published July 31, 2023 7:53 A.M.

(Aliquippa, PA) At 8 a.m. sharp the banner will be received at foundation member Jean Rosati’s home at 1715 Polk/Street. Italian music will be played by the San Rocco   Foundation Band and refreshments will be provided by the foundation. Many of the foundation’s current members are descendants of original foundation members, when it got started in 1925 according to Eugene Frioni, foundation president.