Orchard Park Police Chief Mark Pacholec says his department and the Orchard Park School District are investigating a case of harassment on Twitter.
May 23 2013

LOCKPORT – The Niagara County Legislature is urging the Buffalo Bills to consider downtown Niagara Falls if the football team is seeking a site for a new stadium.The resolution the Legislature passed Tuesday by an 8-4 vote notes that Niagara Falls has large expanses of vacant property close to the international border, which would make it handier for Canadian fans than is Ralph Wilson Stadium in Orchard Park.However, the Bills have shown no official interest in any new stadium, regardless of location.The state and Erie County have agreed to invest $200 million in upgrades at the Ralph during the Bills’ new lease, which binds the team to the Orchard Park site until 2020.“This is about preventing our team from Western New York from leaving for Toronto,” said Legislator Jason A. Zona, D-Niagara Falls, the lead sponsor. “This is just a symbolic resolution that we don’t want to lose our football team.”But some opponents were concerned that the resolution might commit Niagara County to building a stadium for the Bills. Zona denied it, and the resolution was amended to delete a specific reference to “building an NFL stadium in downtown Niagara Falls.”“Of course, we can’t afford to build a stadium. We’re not Erie County,” said Minority Leader Dennis F. Virtuoso, D-Niagara Falls.Opposition came from four members of the GOP-controlled majority caucus: Majority Leader Richard E. Updegrove and Anthony J. Nemi of Lockport, John Syracuse of Newfane and Michael A. Hill of Hartland.“I think Erie County has done a lot of hard work on the lease,” Syracuse said.Three other Republicans – W. Keith McNall of Lockport, David E. Godfrey of Wilson and Paul B. Wojtaszek of North Tonawanda – were absent.In other matters, the Legislature passed the 2013-14 Niagara County Community College budget, which includes a 2.6 percent tuition increase, equivalent to $96 for a full-time, full-year student.The $49 million budget does not seek an increase in the county’s contribution to the college, which will be $8.87 million for the seventh consecutive year.Also Tuesday, the Legislature appointed Michael A. Ross of the City of Lockport as District 4 coroner for the rest of the year.Ross, co-owner of two funeral homes, was recommended by a selection committee last week.Ross, a Republican, succeeds Richard W. Rutland of Newfane, who resigned last month. Ross is expected to run for a full term in this fall’s election.On another matter, the Legislature voted to send a request to Albany for an enabling act that would allow the county to continue charging an 8 percent sales tax for two more years.The current authorization expires Nov. 30. By state law, Niagara County must use all the proceeds of one extra percentage point on its share of the Medicaid program.The Legislature also agreed to create a second welfare fraud investigator position in the Sheriff’s Office. A resolution from the Democrats, seeking to study whether to require inspections of apartments before they are rented to welfare clients, was sent to committee for study. Also sent to committee was a Democratic resolution to seek proposals for voting machine storage.email: tprohaska@buffnews.com
May 21 2013

A motorcycle safety checkpoint conducted by two local police agencies Sunday led to the arrest of an Angola man for driving while intoxicated.Orchard Park police and the state police inspected more than 500 motorcycles on California Road in Orchard Park. During the checkpoint, police charged James Perry, 43, with DWI. A breath test later revealed he had a blood-alcohol content of 0.12 percent, according to police reports.The officers issued 95 traffic tickets, including 55 for illegal helmets, during the afternoon checkpoint.
May 20 2013

The type of historic terra cotta restoration performed by artisans at Boston Valley Terra Cotta is painstaking, time-consuming craftsmanship, and the work has been done largely the same way for decades.Now, a team of students and faculty from the University at Buffalo is helping the Orchard Park company bring the techniques into the 21st century.Researchers in UB’s School of Architecture and Planning have introduced the designers and sculptors at Boston Valley to new, high-tech tools that are saving time and helping them work more efficiently.“We’re extremely lucky to be close to this caliber of facility,” said John Krouse, Boston Valley’s president. “I think it would have been extremely difficult to do it without their help.”The tools – including a carving tool that works in three dimensions and a program that uses photos to create digital images of terra cotta pieces – aren’t intended to replace the craftsmen at Boston Valley with machines and computers.Instead, they are meant to free the workers from the most onerous tasks, allowing them to focus on work that requires creativity while giving them training in valuable skills.And UB students get the practical experience of putting academic concepts to the test in the business world.“It’s embedded learning,” said Omar Khan, chair of UB’s architecture department.The owners of Boston Valley Terra Cotta started fabricating architectural terra cotta 32 years ago, after Krouse and several members of his family bought and reconfigured Boston Valley Pottery, a producer of clay pots that began making bricks in 1889.The new owners sought to recast the pottery company, located near clay deposits in Orchard Park, as a terra cotta manufacturer with a focus on historic restoration.The company’s first restoration project was the ornate facade of the Guaranty Building in downtown Buffalo, which led to assignments across the United States and Canada.Their hundreds of restoration projects have included Craigdarroch Castle in British Columbia, Burnham and Root’s Rookery building in Chicago and the Breakers, the Gilded Age mansion in Newport, R.I.Today, Boston Valley is one of just three companies in the United States that manufacture terra cotta, which is growing in popularity as a building material in new construction, because ceramics are durable, “green” and sustainable.“We’re hoping that goes for 20 or 30 years,” said Krouse, a ceramic engineer, referring to the terra cotta revival.Boston Valley, which declined to provide sales figures, employs 130 people at its 180,000-square-foot facility on South Abbott Road. About half of its business is manufacturing terra cotta for new construction and half is for restorations.Khan and UB researcher Mitchell Bring reached out to Boston Valley prior to the 2011 National Preservation Conference, a major annual event that drew more than 2,000 people to Buffalo when it was held here.UB wanted to demonstrate a more efficient, less invasive approach to restoring terra cotta details on architecturally significant buildings, and it wanted to work with Boston Valley to do this. “How does computing and craft come together?” Khan said.The traditional process of re-creating terra cotta tiles, statues and other building features requires drafters to create a two-dimensional drawing of the object. They work off photos, measurements taken by hand or a piece of the object or facade in question if it can be removed.The drafters’ drawing then is sent to the pattern shop, where sculptors produce a model, typically in plaster.Plaster is poured over the model to produce a hollow mold, before workers press and form terra cotta into the mold. The terra cotta is then finished, dried and fired in a kiln.UB introduced Boston Valley to digital fabrication tools already used by students in an architecture department lab.One, a laser scanner, is used to scan an object that remains on the building or that has been removed from the building. Drafters at Boston Valley were trained to use modeling software to take the data generated by the scanner to create a three-dimensional image.Another high-tech process, known as photogrammetry, uses photographs taken from a number of angles to create a similar 3-D image, and this process is better than a laser scanner for producing images of complex objects. Both approaches make the drafting process and model-making process easier, Khan said.The 3-D images created by the laser scanner or the photogrammetry process are then used to produce a model, either using a laser cutter or cutting tools known as three-axis or five-axis routers, which UB also demonstrated to Boston Valley.The routers get their names from the number of directions the router can move while cutting a piece of foam into a model. Three-axis routers cut along an X-Y axis or up and down.The fourth and fifth axes refer to this newer router’s ability to rotate 180 degrees in a half circle motion around the piece of foam, creating models with undulating peaks and valleys.A laser cutter creates a tool, made of wood and metal, that is used in turn to produce the plaster model.Students at UB built their own five-axis router, following online directions, and used the machine to create replicas of the tiles on the Guaranty Building that were handed out to attendees of the 2011 National Preservation Conference in Buffalo.Boston Valley officials who used the UB router were so impressed they decided to buy an industrial-sized version for themselves, after UB showed employees how to use it.The region benefits when more workers are trained in how to use cutting-edge tools and software, Khan said. “We need people who know how to do this,” he said.Boston Valley used some of its new fabrication tools on its most recent major restoration project, the replacement of four aging, terra cotta female figures attached to the corners of the top floor of 150 Nassau, a condominium high-rise in Manhattan that dates to the 1890s.The 19-foot-tall sculptures, known as caryatids, need to be replaced with terra cotta replicas that will be anchored more securely to the building.A contractor removed one sculpture from the building, piece by piece, and all 54 of them were placed in separate crates and trucked up to Buffalo.Boston Valley artisans used photogrammetry and a laser scanner to create 3-D images of each piece. The company then produced 54 models, molds and terra cotta pieces for the first of the replica caryatids, which look like angels and were dubbed “Dorothy” by UB.Boston Valley’s workers are finishing up the project now, and the first of the replacement caryatids is set to be installed at 150 Nassau in August.For Boston Valley, the new digital tools allow its employees to finish the drafting and modeling process faster, potentially letting the company take on more work as those skilled craftsmen and women focus on tasks that demand creativity.Boston Valley is using the tools again for their next large restoration undertaking, the replacement of the terra cotta dome atop the Alberta Legislature Building in Edmonton.“It’s something that would be almost impossible to do the old way,” Krouse said.For UB, the partnership offers its students a chance to gain practical experience, and several students, including Linfan Liu and Peter Schmidt, have worked at Boston Valley part-time and shared what they learned in the lab at school.The architecture department has set up a Material Culture Research Group and also has started introducing these tools to other companies, including Rigidized Metals, bolstering the region’s push into advanced manufacturing.“We have a lot of really great manufacturers that are going to be retooling, that are going to be moving to far more sophisticated manufacturing processes, and those are all digital, those are all computationally driven,” Khan said.email: swatson@buffnews.com
May 19 2013

Right off the bat, the moderator agreed they were about to discuss “not too pleasant a topic for a sunny Sunday afternoon” – domestic violence and its ugly extreme, honor killings.Domestic violence involves one person out to control another, said Deborah Schnitzer, the domestic violence coordinator and a counselor at the YWCA of the Tonawandas and an adjunct professor at the University at Buffalo’s School of Social Work. The control starts with expressions of love and caring and then gets nastier, until all charm disappears – and the cycle starts over again, she said.Throw in some misinterpreted religion, the misplaced notion of honor and an attempt to control the rest of the family, and you approach honor killings, explained matrimonial mediator and UB Law School professor Nadia Shahram, who moved to the United States from Iran in 1980.Schnitzer and Shahram were among a panel of four women who spoke Sunday in Cheektowaga’s Millennium Hotel to an audience of about 70 people, most of them women, to call attention to extreme violence against women and to see how they and the crowd could prevent it, at least in and around Buffalo.“There is a big distinction between domestic violence and honor killings,” Shahram said. “Domestic violence is about, of course, power and control over the victim, no question ...“But not all domestic violence ends in the killing of the victim, whereas honor killing is about killing the victim – not to teach the victim a lesson, because the victim is dead. Honor killing is about teaching your immediate household, your extended family, the community that you are living at, how girls and females should behave.”In the area’s best-known honor killing, Muzzammil Hassan beheaded his wife, Aasiya, in Orchard Park the week after she filed for divorce in 2009. He was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. In another upstate example of “honor” violence, a 22-year-old man living in the Rochester suburb of Henrietta stabbed his 19-year-old sister for wearing immodest clothing and attempting to move to New York City in May 2008. Waheed Allah Mohammad, who according to media accounts called his sister a “bad Muslim girl,” is serving a prison sentence for attempted second-degree murder.Religion, Islam in particular, often gives rise to honor crimes, the panelists acknowledged. But nothing in the Quran “directs a believing man or a woman to commit such horrific acts against any other human being, even on their own family members,” said Shanaz Tejani-Butt of Philadelphia, Pa., a professor and an adviser to community service organizations.“There is no recorded quotation nor practice of Prophet Muhammad that sanctions such crimes,” she said. “The teachings of Islam are intended to create peace and order, not chaos and violence, no matter whether you are talking at the individual level, the communal level or the global level.” She said she knew of no religion that condones such violence.The speakers eventually turned to the audience to ask for suggestions on how to push back against violence against women. Schnitzer said some of the ideas could become the focus of a gathering later this summer.Out came suggestions about better education and promoting awareness, especially with young men. But one woman said she would eagerly make her home into a safe house for as many as 10 women seeking refuge from violent domestic partners. She suggested a network of such havens.One of the roughly 15 men attending the event suggested a change in terminology. When considering that no religion condones domestic violence or honor killings, Othman Shibly of Amherst suggested retiring the term honor killings. It should be replaced with “dishonor killings,” he said.email: mspina@buffnews.com
May 19 2013

Orchard Park Police are hunting for 23-year-old Ryan Cooper. He is the subject of this week’s Warrant Watch.
May 17 2013

However, Two On Your Side has been able to review many of the tweets posted and which have been the source of the investigation.
May 24 2013

James Perry of Angola was arrested for DWI during a motorcycle safety and education checkpoint in Orchard Park Sunday.
May 19 2013

Orchard Park police are seeking public help in their continuing investigation of the theft of $9,000 worth of jewelry during a residential burglary at 3894 Baker road sometime Wednesday morning. Officials said the perpetrator or perpetrators gained entry by forcing open a side door. The theft included rings, chains, necklaces, bracelets, watches and earrings and a leather football signed by several of the Buffalo Bills players in the early 1990s that has personal sentimental value. Detectives are asking anyone with information to call them at 716-662-6475, extension 4016.
May 16 2013