Two Nassau County Police officers revved up the motor on a device not much larger than a lawnmower engine. As the machine roared last Wednesday afternoon, the officers used its cutters to slowly peel off the driver’s side door of a badly damaged minivan. No one was inside the van, but students at Holy Trinity High School in Hicksville watched quietly and anxiously as the “Jaws of Life” crushed the car’s metal. more

Call it a tale of two forests. On the west side of the Meadowbrook Parkway, on the outskirts of Freeport and Roosevelt, there is the 73-acre Roosevelt Preserve, owned and maintained by Nassau County. There, the wide paths are clear of fallen trees and shrubbery and virtually trash-free. There is no evidence of campfires having burned down swaths of the woods, nor is there graffiti marring the abundant oaks and maples. more

Updated 5:45 p.m. on Dec. 27. A fierce winter storm that rolled into Bellmore-Merrick around 9 a.m. on Sunday continued to pound the community through Monday morning, dumping 12 to 20 inches of snow on the ground and buffeting the area with winds from 15 to 50 miles per hour. Temperatures dipped into the teens. more

Thomas Crotty stood and stared for a moment on Friday at the twisted, rusted, 1,600-pound steel girder in front of the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District’s Brookside School in North Merrick. “It was very thoughtful of the community and the young people to do this so the day and the people will not be forgotten,” Crotty remarked. more

Thirty-eight years after Joe Corea began his four-decade career as Calhoun High School's head baseball coach, he can still rattle off most of the names on his starting lineup from his very first year -–– 1972. more

A cold drizzle fell as the short, yellow school bus from the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District pulled up last Wednesday to Kennedy Airport's Hagar 17, the 80,000-square-foot storehouse for the remains of what once were the two tallest buildings in the world. more

Richard Lawrence of Merrick, a former Nassau County Family Court judge, longtime legal counsel to a state senator, and well-respected, well-loved community activist, died suddenly on April 21 of complications from a bone-marrow transplant. He was 66. more

Saul Lerner, the Bellmore-Merrick Central High School District athletic director, recently resigned his post as coordinator of the Nassau County Boys' Basketball Committee because, he said, the Section VIII Athletic Council rejected a proposal of his to fine-tune the seeding process that ultimately determines teams' playing schedules. In 2006, Lerner was the architect of an ability-grouping system that determined a team's conference by its record. Previously, teams were assigned to conferences without much regard to their records. Rather, officials used what they called the "snake," in which teams were seeded and then laid out on a grid that wound back and forth in serpentine fashion. more