MANALAPAN — Local police are organizing a daylong event at the township high school to teach students about the dangers of drinking and driving.
The program, which coincides with the start of prom season, will be held for Manalapan High School juniors and seniors on April 29, said Officer Kevin Ruditsky, an organizer of the program.
Almost 1,000 students are expected to take part in the program, which will include cautionary speeches about the consequences of drunk driving, and test drives of golf carts and a "slide car."
Scheduled to speak are: Monmouth County Prosecutor's Agent Reginald Grant; a team of nurses from Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick; Karen Colegary, a Freehold Township resident whose daughter, Tara, was killed on Jan. 1, 2001, by a drunk driver in Florida; the township's former municipal prosecutor, Allen Falk, whose father was killed by a drunk driver; and Ari Solomon, 21, a former Manalapan student who was sentenced to 300 days in the Middlesex County jail on an assault by auto charge, following a car crash that injured two of his passengers in that county in 2004. Solomon now works with the local community alliance.
In addition, State Police plan to present the New Jersey Drive Program. They will set up a closed course in the parking lot and allow students to try to drive golf carts while wearing fatal vision goggles.
Those goggles distort a driver's sight, simulating the vision of a person who is impaired by alcoholic beverages or drugs, State Police said.
A Little Silver company, Driving Dynamics, will bring a "slide car," to allow students to experience skidding and sliding in a controlled environment, Ruditsky said. An instructor will sit in the passenger seat, while a student drives on a closed course. The car simulates fishtailing and the instructor teaches the students how to safely recover control of the vehicle, he said.
At the end of the day, emergency workers will set up a demonstration of the aftermath of a drunk-driving accident, said Ruditsky.
Students involved in the ADAPT program (Adolescent Drug & Alcohol Prevention Team) will play roles in the demonstration, which will be held on the football field.
Firefighters will cut apart the vehicles, a state police helicopter will land, police will "arrest" the driver, and a student will be put in a body bag then placed in a hearse, police said.
This month's program is the first of its kind at the school in several years.
A smaller program was held three years ago, with an accident-aftermath demonstration and a few speakers, but this year's program will be much larger, police said.
Police said they now plan to hold the larger program every two years, so each class will get the chance to participate once.
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FREEHOLD TOWNSHIP — An inmate rehabilitation program has been turned into a high-tech process, and Monmouth County Jail officials say the change has yielded encouraging results.
The Freehold Township jail has long offered prisoners the chance to earn high school-equivalency diplomas. But for the first time, inmates are receiving online prep instruction for the diplomas.
Sheriff Kim Guadagno said at least five participants from a class that began in November are expected to receive diplomas.
"Anytime we can give inmates an opportunity to better themselves, we try to provide that," Guadagno said. There's no extra cost to county taxpayers for the program, she said.
The Monmouth County Board of Freeholders on Feb. 28 approved a resolution appropriating $93,700 for a contract with the Monmouth-Ocean Educational Services Commission to run the program for a year. Guadagno said the amount is essentially reimbursed to the county from commissary purchases that go into an inmate welfare fund.
Corrections Capt. Thomas Philburn said plans are to begin the second round of the 18-week online classes in June.
"We are pleased by the way it's going," Philburn said. "We went from a traditional learning setting to a virtual setup. Students are showing tremendous progress in taking their studies to diploma status. There was one student to achieve a diploma in the last three years, but this is a transitory population and some people may go home before they're finished or they may go to another institution. But the success result rate has become much higher since we went to online learning."
Philburn said the participants range in age from 18 to those in their 30s and 40s. Inmates also have access to basic skills studies and English as a second language instruction, he said.
"A vast majority of these people are capable of achieving great things with an education," he said.
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NEWARK — Two remaining juvenile suspects in last summer's schoolyard slayings in Newark will be tried as adults.
Sixteen-year-old Shahid Baskerville of Morristown and 15-year-old Gerardo Gomez of Newark were waived up to adult court Thursday.
Both teens face three counts of murder in addition to weapons charges. Baskerville also is charged with aggravated sexual assault.
The two youths and four other suspects are charged in the execution-style slayings of three friends.
Twenty-year-old Iofemi Hightower, 20-year-old Dashon Harvey and 18-year-old Terrance Aeriel were shot as they knelt in front of a wall in a school playground.
Aeriel's sister, Natasha, survived and helped authorities identify suspects.
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TRENTON — New Jersey's attorney general wants to clarify her directive on questioning illegal immigrants.
There has been some confusion among police since Attorney General Anne Milgram ordered police to notify immigration authorities when they arrest someone suspected of being an illegal immigrant.
Critics claim police have gone too far in questioning people — including witnesses to a crime — about their immigration status. Others say the directive doesn't do enough.
Milgram plans to release a training video to clear up some of the confusion.
Her directive came after the execution-style slayings of three college-bound friends in Newark last year. One of the suspects was an illegal immigrant who was free on bail at the time of the slayings despite facing aggravated assault and child rape charges.
