The world began to discover this quiet little suburb at 11 p.m. on May 23, courtesy of Channel 4 News in New York. That`s when all hell broke loose. The story was shocking: 13 high school students brought a 17-year-old, mildly retarded girl to the basement of a Glen Ridge home, where she reportedly was sexually assaulted with a miniature baseball bat and a broomstick. The incident happened March 1, but by the end of May, no arrests had been made, provoking speculation of a coverup.
A day after the first report, the Essex County prosecutor`s office charged five students with aggravated sexual assault, including three co-captains of the high school football team, Peter Quigley, 18, and twin brothers Kevin and Kyle Scherzer, who are also 18. Two juveniles were also charged, but their names were not released.
In journalistic terms, it was a textbook ”Can`t Happen Here” story. It came on the heels of the brutal rape of a woman by a group of youths who went ”wilding” in New York`s Central Park. But these were kids from an affluent suburb 12 miles west of New York, who just might have been protected from punishment by the town`s officials had not the press stepped in.
Glen Ridge is so little, just three miles long and a half-mile wide, that some people who live in northern New Jersey have never heard of it. Ridgewood Avenue, its main boulevard, is an elegant promenade of turn-of-the-century gas lanterns, tall oak trees and 12-room homes that sell for $500,000 and more. It has no business, other than a barbershop and handful of stores, and it likes it that way. Its major industry, townspeople said, was educating children.
`TOWN OF SHAME`
Now Glen Ridge was about to get its 15 minutes of fame.
”TOWN OF SHAME,” screamed a New York Post headline. A photo of the Scherzers` neat, two-story frame home on Lorraine Street was captioned ”HOUSE OF HORROR.” Five television stations and half a dozen newspapers staked out the high school for days, interviewing students who knew the victim and the boys who had been charged.
As Glen Ridge became the top news story in New York, the world began to descend on the town. Four times in five days the 350 high school students were evacuated because of bomb threats, some phoned in from out of state. Police received a call from California, where a man said he was going to kill every student in the school with his assault rifle.
The students and teachers learned to handle the near-daily evacuations as part of their regular routine. One recent day, music teacher Cathy Calderone drilled a student on the melody to ”Maria,” prepping for a student production of ”West Side Story.” They were in the corner of the gymnasium, with the rest of the student body, while they waited for bomb-sniffing dogs to clear the rest of the school.
But many in town were chilled by the outsiders who reacted with vehemence to the contradiction between the town`s affluence and the nature of the alleged assault. Sometimes when they shopped in nearby towns and wrote out a check with a Glen Ridge address, they were insulted by store clerks. As a science teacher stood near Ridgewood Avenue during one of the bomb
evacuations, three people drove by and shouted at her, ”Kill the rapists.”
Jeff Bogart, 18, a senior, said he couldn`t escape the stigma surrounding the town even when his family fled to the beaches in south Jersey. ”My sister was at a bar this weekend and she was proofed (asked for ID),” he said. ”And when they saw `Glen Ridge,` they said, `How could you even come here? How could you claim that you`re from that town?` And they called her a rich SOB. She had to leave.”
Memorial Day services provided a backdrop for a band of Guardian Angels and their model-turned-vigilante leader, Lisa Sliwa, who held a press conference on Ridgewood Avenue calling for a state law that all male sex offenders be castrated.
”I was more afraid of (the Angels) than I am of anybody in this town,”
said Mimi Moriarty, 18, high school student council president.
Glen Ridge`s sudden notoriety is hardly unique. It has joined the list of places that suddenly become famous for unfortunate reasons: New Bedford, Mass., where a gang of men raped a woman in a bar; Stockton, Calif., where a gunman shot up a school; Winnetka, where Laurie Dann killed a child and terrorized a school.
Yet somehow there was a flashpoint in Glen Ridge that, unlike other places, turned the town into a target of scorn and derision.
In part, it flashed because of one mistake. The teenage son of Glen Ridge Police Lt. Richard Corcoran, who had been involved in the incident, made an obscene gesture at a New York television reporter who was trying to interview him. The scene was recorded and played on local and national newscasts, and on the Phil Donahue Show. Although most of Glen Ridge was anguishing over the incident, the town seemed-through this one teenager-to be telling the world to blow off. When another student told a newspaper reporter that the girl ”probably asked for it,” the town appeared to be cold and callous.
In part, it flashed because of the town`s proximity to New York City and its ravenous media, which had recently exhausted the Tawana Brawley story
(another gang-rape case) and saw the drama of the Central Park rape case ebbing.
”I think New York is undergoing some kind of mass psychosis,” said Rev. Michael Hansen, a Catholic priest who worked closely with teens in Glen Ridge. ”Unfortunately, TV is the forum for playing it out.”
A crop of heroes
Despite its size, Glen Ridge has thrived in New Jersey high school sports-36 banners from conference championships cover one wall of the school`s gymnasium. And several of the students charged with assault were in the current crop of heroes. Kevin Scherzer was a linebacker, and his brother Kyle was the quarterback last fall for the Glen Ridge High School football team. The girl, too, played on sports teams at Glen Ridge High, although she attended special education classes at nearby West Orange High School.
She left Carteret Park one afternoon with the boys and trooped a short distance to the Scherzers` house, next to the park. The boys` parents were in Florida, but the twins greeted their grandmother as they walked into the house and down to the partly finished basement. There, three of the students assaulted her while the others watched, prosecutors say.
The initial press reports said the girl was either ”lured” or
”coerced” into the basement, but in a brief interview with The Record, a suburban New Jersey newspaper, the girl suggested that she went to the house willingly.
”Some of it was force and some of it I allowed, because they wouldn`t think I`d like them (if I didn`t), something like that,” said the girl. Called an ”attractive brunette” in media reports, she complained about being identified as ”retarded.” That created more confusion among residents about how responsible the girl was for her own actions.
She told a teacher about the incident March 4, and it was reported to police March 22. Two weeks later, the police sought the help of specialists in sexual assault from the county prosecutor`s office. On April 11, Lt. Corcoran, who was assigned to the investigation, revealed that his son had been in the basement. Corcoran was removed from the case, and the county prosecutor took over the investigation.
More than two months after the incident, no action had been taken on the case, but word was spreading in town as students were called in for questioning. The arrests were made May 24, the morning after the first television story.
No one in town is sure what happened in the Scherzers` basement, but no one writes it off as typical teenager behavior or something that can happen only somewhere else.
”You`d have to be crazy to sit here and say that nothing ever happens in Glen Ridge,” said Christine Lane, a school board member and mother of two children. ”We do not sit on an island, protected from the evils of society by living here.”
Glen Ridge has no moat to keep away the troubles of the world. Some suspect that the town`s high standard of living and the pressure on parents to maintain that standard might even create problems.
In recent years, there have been more families split by divorce and more families where both parents catch an early train for jobs in New York City and take the late train home.
”A bagel and a coke in first period, that`s how some of these kids start the day,” said Carl Hostnik, a math teacher for 32 years in the high school. ”The parents go off on vacation and figure it wouldn`t be a vacation if the kids came along. So they`re home, and no one`s there to supervise. Some families are still strong. But many of them aren`t coming from what a family is supposed to be like.”
There is some soul-searching going on, but it has been largely overwhelmed by the intense press coverage, the town`s own questions about what really happened in the basement and the intensely divided loyalties among students.
Many students defended the youths who were charged, and some who criticized them have been threatened. Older brothers have become bodyguards on the route to school. One student who spoke out on television found a headless mannequin on his front yard the next morning. Another student`s car was vandalized.
About 40 students have sought counseling at the high school to deal with their feelings or fears.
”It`s a matter of loyalty versus disgust,” said high school Principal Michael Buonomo.
”Then they`ve been blitzed by the media, and they`re concerned about their own well-being, and they want to support the community and have sympathy for the young lady. That`s a tough combination to have to deal with in a 15-year-old body.”
