UB students attending the Halloween party on Lisbon St this weekend, got more than they planned for when the party ended up fatal to attendee Jacob Herbert.
Big and noisy parties are nothing new in the city's University Heights neighborhood, but the Halloween bash put on by some young men on Lisbon Avenue took a tragic turn that won't soon be forgotten.
The party at 112 Lisbon was so big that it spilled out into a parking lot across the street, and it was so noisy that Buffalo Police officers came by twice to break it up.
Neighbors said the party was extremely loud and was so big that many of the partygoers went to a nearby school parking lot, where it became a tailgate party with people wearing Halloween costumes. Buffalo News
An impromptu memorial to Jacob Herbert on site where he was killed
This stabbing illustrates just about everything that is wrong with Buffalo. It reads like an industrial or airplane accident; missteps, that taken by themselves, are insignificant (or in our case major nuances, but not generally life threatening), snowball to a catastrophic result.
- Put a bunch of young people into absentee landlord housing with little or no adult presence anywhere.
- Ignore the few remaining homeowners repeated requests for help dealing with young people learning how to be adults.
- Add large sums of money to be made by selling alcohol to a huge audience of underage consumers. At $5 a cup, there was easily over $1000 made, not bad for one nights work. This would be just for the beer, shots etc extra.
- Understaff a police department so badly that there is no one to run a burglary or robbery patrol and certainly so understaffed that there is no one who wants to spend the 4 hours or more it would take to round everyone up, take them to the Motel Hell and file all that paper work. Just tell the desperate residents that you had “real crime” to deal with and leave it at that.
- Throw in one of those neighborhood killing corner "stores" that attracts Bennett HS juvies to rampage during the day and gets the real bad asses to show up at night. Put up a crime camera in front the store because its such a frequent crime scene. Don't shut it down.
Buff City - neighborhood scourge. 90 Lisbon
The story ends in all those unfortunately predictable ways, someone dies, more homeowners get fed up and leave, more slumlords buy up whats left and Buffalo continues spiraling downward at an ever increasing pace.
Epic FAIL for all involved:
Bonnie Russell for allowing "Buff City" to continue to exist in the neighborhood and for not being in Brown’s face daily demanding more resources for her district.
Buffalo Police for not taking these mob scenes, quaintly know as “parties” seriously.
Byron Brown's failure to deal with the slumlords in any meaningful way. Waiting for everything to fall down, so you can sell it off to realestate buddies for pennies on the dollar and then get the feds and state to pay you to rebuild may be a plan, but its not working out so good for you or Buffalo, eh?
Byron Brown's failure to staff E district to deal with the changing demographics and escalating violence in the Heights.
Simpson and the other overpaid UB administrators who think $10s of millions in sports spending, a fake Main St and fake lake ($5 billion and counting of NYS tax dollars) will do anything to keep the kids from coming to the Heights. You can’t blame the students, unlike The Rez, the Heights can be fun until it all gets a little too real.
But, unlike industrial accidents that get investigated by OSHA, FAA etc. in an effort to keep them from happening again, we can count on Brown to deliver more of the same.
The Vernon boys had quite a playpen at 112 Lisbon. That's a Volkswagon hanging from a swing set. I won't even speculate what that's for.
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