Twenty-five years ago this month, fear gripped Riverhead, penetrating the community like winter’s chill, eroding residents’ sense of security in their own homes. The fear lasted nearly two months – 54 days of wondering who was shooting people, why they were doing it and when it might happen next. First in a three-part series.
Attacks in the night leave residents in the dark
Bernie Heaney was at a doctor’s appointment in Greenport with his wife Maria early in the evening of Monday, Dec. 5, 1988 when they got a call from their son, Kerry, who told them their other son, Bernard Timothy Heaney, had been injured in an accident and was at Central Suffolk Hospital.
Bernie sent Maria home — “to protect me,” she said — but they reunited at the hospital later, where they saw their son’s body. Timothy, 30, of Jamesport, had been shot and killed outside his auto-body shop, Save-On Customizing, on Flanders Road in Flanders. He was shopping for a Christmas present for Kerry with a mobile tools salesman who was visiting the shop.
Timothy’s dog Jack was outside the truck when the two men heard what they thought were firecrackers. Timothy rushed outside to his dog and saw he’d been shot. As he walked toward the nearby woods, the first of several more shots rang out. He was hit five times, the last bullet striking him in the head. He left a young widow and two daughters, ages 9 and 7.
“Horrendous,” Maria said of her family’s experience that day. She remembers pleading with hospital staff to wait for her daughter to arrive and say goodbye to her brother before his body was taken for an autopsy. Her daughter pulled into the hospital parking lot as the medical examiner’s van carrying Timothy’s body was pulling out.
“That was very traumatic,” Maria said.
The very next night, a shotgun blast shattered the living room window of Richard Jensen’s Lincoln Street home. He was watching TV with his daughter, sitting with his hands clasped behind his head. The blast severed the middle fingers on both of his hands. Buckshot lodged in his head, but the bones of his hands likely saved his life.
Ted Squires was in the kitchen of his Ostrander Avenue home the following night when a shotgun blast crashed through his window, hitting his upper back. He fell to the floor, unable to move his arms. He lay there as a family member called for help and police arrived — the same family member he’d had a casual conversation with earlier that day about the slim chance of ever being shot in Riverhead.
“Talk about fate,” Squires said.
The next evening, Donald J. Crump was watching TV with his mother in his Riverside home when a .22-caliber bullet came through the window and struck his jaw.
Riverhead and Southampton Police had no suspects, no motive and scant leads, save for a call made to police by a person purporting to be the shooter after Heaney was killed. The person told police they had declared war on drug dealers and crooked cops, creating another layer of suspicion, this one questioning the integrity of the gunman’s innocent victims. They were all men in their 30s. Three were white and one was black. Riverhead’s police chief, Lawrence Grattan, told reporters he believed the victims were selected for a reason and not at random. [See part two: Town ‘in a state of siege’]
Grattan has since passed away, but his cousin, Joseph, a Riverhead Police lieutenant at the time who would later succeed him as chief of the department, remembers the increased patrols each day once December’s early darkness fell.
“All hands were on board. When it got to be two and three, the concern escalated at every new incident,” he said.
Grattan lives diagonally across the street from Squires and was in his own kitchen when his wife came in and said she heard someone’s heavy footsteps run across the front yard. Shortly after, police cars swarmed the block. Grattan said he’s always wondered if the gunman might have crossed the street had he not spotted Squires in his kitchen.
“Maybe shot my other neighbor, maybe me,” he said.
The shootings stopped as the Christmas shopping season ramped up, but downtown Riverhead’s businesses saw their sales cut in half, especially after dark. Dozens of bulletproof-vested police officers saturated the business district with their presence. Police helicopters buzzed overhead.
A neighborhood paralyzed, and another attack
Former Ostrander Avenue resident Warren Goldstein remembers the tension of that holiday season. His household celebrated Hanukkah and Christmas, and he recalled the irony of anxious suspicion gripping his community during the giving season.
“Hanukkah celebrates the bravery of a band of revolutionaries, and Christmas is the coming of the Prince of Peace, and here we are cowering inside,” he recalled.
Goldstein wrote an editorial published Dec. 22, 1988 in Newsday titled “Fear in the Candles’ Glow.” He wrote about the absence of seasonal lighting as bedding went up over windows all over town, and about the creeping nature of the fear a gunman had instilled. In an act of impulsive defiance, Goldstein went outside and stood on his front lawn one night after his three young children were in bed.
“All at once, I realized that I had become a suspicious character, that I didn’t know which of my neighbors were hunters, or which owned handguns, or which were watching me from the corners of their blanketed picture windows. I felt powerfully, terrifyingly alone, for the 30 seconds it took me to walk deliberately – don’t hurry, I said to myself, don’t do anything suspicious – back to my porch. When I got inside, my face was hot with embarrassment and fear. The gunman made me more afraid of my neighbors than of him. Is my community really so unreliable that I couldn’t trust it not to shoot me on my front lawn? Now I was suspicious of my neighbors, just as I had feared their suspicion of me,” Goldstein wrote.
“Fear is very powerful. It seeps into all kinds of things, at once,” he said this week. “Everyone had to decide when it was OK to let their kids play outside.”
Nine days later the gunman struck again.
Southampton Town Police Officer Larry Doscinski was working the midnight shift in the early morning hours of Dec. 31 when he was called to the scene of an accident near the McDonald’s on Route 24 in Riverside. He arrived at the location and didn’t see anything on his first pass. During his second pass he neared McDonald’s and heard “a loud report, like something hit the side of my car,” said Doscinski, now retired at 66.
Thinking his car had been shot, he decided not to pull over and instead drove to a gas station on the Route 24 traffic circle at Peconic Avenue. He flagged down a passing Riverhead patrol car and the two officers examined the body of Doscinski’s cruiser with flashlights for signs of the shot. Finding nothing, Doscinski finished what turned out to be a quiet shift. When he went to pick up his relief, Officer Mark Raynor, morning’s light had arrived. As the men got out to switch seats, Raynor noticed a dent in the strip of metal running up the side of the windshield on the driver’s side.
“Larry, there’s your bullet hole,” Doscinski remembers Raynor saying. An inch to the left or right and the bullet would have penetrated a window.
Having served 18 months in a U.S. Army medical company at a base camp in Vietnam, the close call wasn’t enough to leave Doscinski too shaken. It was the brush with apprehending a roving gunman that stuck in Doscinski’s mind.
“I’ll tell you the one thing that bothered me: to me, not realizing that ’til the morning — obviously the shooter was long gone, and it bothered me that that was probably the best opportunity to catch the sniper,” he said. “It bothered me at that time that maybe this guy would go out and shoot somebody else.”
Doscinski’s mother fainted when he told her what happened. He didn’t tell his wife, Shirley, until after he reported to headquarters after the incident.
“You told them not to say a word if I called,” Shirley Doscinski said to her husband during an interview last week, recalling his instructions to police personnel at headquarters. “And they didn’t — they didn’t say anything. They said you were at a meeting,” she recalled. “You came home at 1:30, I said, ‘What happened? Bad accident or something really bad?’ He was going up the stairs and he just turned around and said, ‘No. I was just sniper shot at.’ I coulda killed ya myself.”
The incident was the last perpetrated by the gunman. A suspect would be apprehended four weeks later and a trial set to begin, but the lives his actions affected were already following their altered courses in different ways.
Grief, trauma and healing in violence’s wake
Squires still works at Wedel Signs in Riverhead as he did 25 years ago. He doesn’t like to talk about the night he was shot. To him, the attempt on his life is less a milestone of it than just one of a series of adverse events that he’s survived; he was once critically injured when he was hit by a car in New York City, and in 2012 he had a near-death bout with a flesh-eating bacteria that infected his leg.
The experiences have taught Squires how to keep moving no matter how hard life might throw him down.
“I think the more you go through, the more you’re thankful for what you have,” he said.
The man who shot him doesn’t occupy any space in his thoughts – “I wouldn’t give him that,” Squires said – but he keeps his home’s window dressings closed.
Richard Jensen declined to be interviewed, saying he’d rather not talk publicly about what happened. Donald Crump has since died.
Bernie and Maria Heaney now live in upstate New York, about a half-hour from where the man who killed their son is incarcerated. Their daughter, Maria, the only surviving sibling of four, lives in New Jersey.
The family had already lost one of their four children when Timothy was murdered. Their son, Shawn, was lost at sea in Alaska in 1985 during a storm that swept him from the icey deck of a commercial fishing boat. Maria said Kerry was deeply affected by the second loss of a brother.
“He just could never be happy,” said Maria. He threw himself into his work and developed an alcohol problem, she said. Kerry died suddenly in 2012 at the age of 50. The years of emotional distress probably played some part, Maria said.
Timothy’s wife and daughters moved to Florida after his death, the Riverhead area being too associated with their personal tragedy, Maria said. His wife remarried but lost her second husband to a medical issue. His daughters are in their 30s now and doing well in their chosen professions, she reported.
Timothy and Shawn’s cousins started a family-funded scholarship in 1989 to honor two men who cousin Anne Heaney Chouinard described as “pillars of the community.” The scholarship has awarded $118,450 to 161 Greenport High School seniors as of 2013. Its application mentions Timothy’s long list of achievements he accomplished in his short life.
A champion wrestler on Greenport High School’s wrestling team, his mother said he would prepare between matches out of sight underneath the bleachers, rather than flexing to the side of the mat in view of the crowd like his teammates and opponents. He won 26 awards wrestling competitively. He was an Eagle Scout who saved the lives of three people on two separate occasions during his lifeguard shifts at a local beach. At his body shop he would customize vans for the handicapped, often at a greatly reduced cost, Maria said. She called him “extremely protective” of his sister; he was devoted to his two daughters.
Maria made regular visits to the courtroom over the course of the year prior to the start of the trial of the man suspected of her son’s killing. She sat in on other trials by the judge who would try the case to see how he ruled in other cases. She watched the different prosecutors, “how they worked.” Maria said she found a great deal of support through the group Parents of Murdered Children.
She said her and her husband’s faith is another element that got them through the untimely deaths of their three sons.
“Well you know, the only way I can think of it is that our children didn’t belong to us,” she said. “They belonged to God. They were on loan to us. He needed them back and He took them.”
Part two:
The Riverhead sniper case: town ‘in a state of siege’ as police scramble to find gunman
Part three:
Who is Yusef Rahman, the convicted Riverhead Sniper?
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