By Ed Wendell

projectwoodhaven@gmail.com

“Local Man Is Held On Double Murder Charge” read the headline in the Leader Observer 90 years ago. Here’s the story behind that headline.

It began in March of 1933 when police were called to the offices of the Waxcraft Candle & Crayon Company on York Street in Brooklyn. There they found one of the owners, Hyman Berson, shot to death. Nearby they found his nephew Charles, also shot and clinging to life.

Charles was able to identify their assailant, Hyman’s partner in the business, Simon Stern. Stern lived at 94th Street and 86th Road in the Brooklyn Manor section of Woodhaven, Queens.

Police traveled to the Stern household, a lovely attached home on a beautiful tree-lined street where they found the businessman eating dinner with his wife and son. They brought Stern to the bedside of Charles Berson where he pointed to Stern and, again, identified him as the killer just before dying from his wounds.

Stern was arrested and incarcerated without bail at the Raymond Street Jail, the notorious Brooklyn prison which operated from 1836 through 1963.

The trial began in November of 1933 and the prosecutors wasted no time laying out the case against the businessman.

First, they noted that Stern had ample motive to murder his partner, Hyman. Their business had been foundering and they were in debt. But the two businessmen had both taken out insurance policies worth $20,000 with each partner serving as the other’s beneficiary.

Next they told the jury that Stern owned a revolver, the same kind that would have produced the wounds that killed the two men. However, Stern was unable to produce the gun, claiming it had been lost in early 1932 when he lost a bag on the Sutter Avenue Bus in Brooklyn.

The driver of the bus testified that Stern did indeed report a lost bag on his bus but that Stern did not mention a gun when reporting the contents of the lost bag. Furthermore, Stern renewed the permit for his revolver with the local precinct in late 1932, months after he claimed to have lost it.

Woodhaven’s Simon Stern may have escaped justice in the 1933 slaying of Hyman and Charles Berson, but fate caught up with him on a lonely road in 1938 outside of Goshen, NY.

And finally there was the deathbed statement from Charles Berson, who stated in front of witnesses that Stern was the gunman.

Stern’s defense was led by Leo Healy, a former Brooklyn District Attorney and Homicide Court Judge appointed to that position by Mayor Jimmy Walker. Healy had resigned for health reasons shortly after being cleared of charges of corruption and spent the rest of his career as a famed defense attorney.

Healy told the jury about candle and crayon trust racketeers who had paid Charles Berson $150,000 to stay out of the candle business only to be double-crossed when he resumed business under a dummy name with Stern and his uncle.

Healy dismissed the missing gun, maintaining that it had been lost on that Brooklyn bus, explaining Stern’s permit renewal as an effort to retain pull with the local police when pulled over for traffic violations.

And finally, Healy noted that Berson’s dying declaration that Stern was the shooter was of no value because Berson had not been made aware that he was going to die. The law at the time stated that any person giving a dying declaration be fully aware that they were dying with no hope for recovery.

The jury spent three hours deliberating Stern’s fate before leaving prosecutors stunned by coming back with a verdict of Not Guilty.

Stern waited until the crowds left the courthouse before leaving. Outside, he was attacked by Charles Berson’s widow Sadie who, according to news accounts “punched, bit, kicked and battered him into a bloody pulp” before police could intervene.

Stern declined to press charges against the widow, saying “Probably if I were in her place I would do the same thing.” Stern returned to his Woodhaven home a free man.

The arrest of businessman Simon Stern of 94th Street and 86th Road in Woodhaven made headlines in the Leader Observer 90 years ago in 1933. The trial would keep Woodhaven riveted until a verdict was reached later that year.

Over the next few years, prosecutors kept investigating the murder while Stern opened a shoe store in Brooklyn. Stern was under secret indictment for the murders and the state was preparing to retry him in 1938 when he was killed in a head-on automobile collision outside of Goshen, in Orange County, New York.

And with that, the case was closed; the secret indictment was quashed and no one else was ever charged in the murders of Hyman and Charles Berson.

By Pamela Rider

news@queensledger.com

The people that work at food pantries are volunteers to help distribute food to the people in the community. Photo by Pamela Rider

The Jamaica area has an abundance of food pantries.

Deliverance Temple Food, Morris Brown AME Church-Helping Hand FoodPantries, Brooks Memorial United Methodist, Bethel Mission Church, Inc-Food, Bethel Gospel Tabernacle Church, Rush Temple AME Zion Church, are some of the sites that provide food weekly to the community.

Many local food pantries feed over 100,000 people in their community on a monthly basis.

Bethel Tabernacle runs their food pantry in the style of “grocery shopping.”

“I think that it’s important to make pantry service more of a grocery shopping experience,” Coordinator Jim Parsons shared with the Leader-Observer. “It adds warmth and flavor.”

“I am so thankful for these pantries,” said 87 year old Martha Wilson. She added, “I don’t know what I would do without them. I only receive social security, and we all know how that is.”

Many communities have a local food pantry. Most of these community food pantries are sponsored by local area churches or community coalitions. A food pantry is a distribution center where hungry families can receive food.

For many years, food pantries and soup kitchens have been a vital part of sustenance for many individuals that work for minimum wages, and require supplementary accommodations by their federal, city, and state governments.

These pantries are supplied with food from Food Banks, Grocery Store Overstock, Thrift Store Profits to Purchase Food, Community food collection/ donations, and Free from our Garden participants. A community food pantry’s mission is to directly serve local residents who suffer from hunger and food insecurities within a specific area.

Food banks receive food from federal programs. The USDA purchases food from farmers and delivers it to food banks for distribution in their communities. Presently, food pantries serve much more than soup and bread. Specifically, food pantries provide families with canned soup,

canned fruit, canned and fresh vegetables, canned stew, canned fish, canned beans, whole grain pasta, brown rice and dairy.

“City Harvest,” is the world’s first and largest food rescue organization established in 1980 that helped start the food rescue movement when a group of New Yorkers saw that New York City had an abundance of excess food, even while a number of residents struggled to feed themselves and their families. It is a Non-Profit Organization located at 150 52nd Street Brooklyn.

New York State recipients of the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program” (SNAP), have received a 15% boost in SNAP benefits since January 2021 due to the COVID crisis by “The Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance” (OTDA). The increased benefits were intended to stop once the government declared an end to the Covid public health emergency.

Although the public health emergency has been extended until April, Congress passed the “Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023” in December 2022 that ended the supplemental “Emergency Assistance” benefits. February 2023 was the last month that supplemental benefits were issued to eligible recipients; nonetheless, food prices continue to rise due to deficits of natural reproduction.

Wilma Silks, a health care worker said, “You’d be surprised with the quality of the food that is given. Some of it is good name brand items, and many times the vegetables come from farms that donate to pantries. People used to think that pantries were for the poor and underprivileged, but now-a-days, many of us are considered underprivileged due to inflation.”

CBS News reported in Jan. 2023 that the cost of eggs is soaring as America’s eating habits change. A deadly disease “The Avian-flu,” wipes out millions of birds which has resulted with an inflation for the price of eggs.

On January 23, 2023, “The Economics Daily- Bureau of Labor Statistics” reported that consumer prices for all items rose 6.5 percent from December 2021 to December 2022. Food prices have increased 10.4 percent reflecting an 11.8 percent increase in prices for food at home, and an 8.3 percent increase in prices for food away from home.

Lawrence Walker, a 67 year old retired MTA worker said, “Even though I get money from my retirement and social security, I’m grateful that I can get some type of relief on my pocket by visiting my local food pantries!”

The history of food banks, pantries and soup kitchens in America can be traced back to the year 1929 with the effects of growing depression. When food pantries and soup kitchens first appeared, they were run by churches or private charities that served mostly soup and bread.

Local Food Pantries are used as a subsidy which accommodates many working individuals on a tight budget to put needed food on their table for themselves and their families.

For information about your community food pantry, go to https://www.foodpantries.org.