Wantagh Herald 04-08-2021

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Vol. 69 No. 15

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APRIl 8 - 14, 2021

TBT garden gets TLC from Eagle Scout candidate

Hopping into spring Harper Lavine played hopscotch at a socially distanced meet-and-greet with the Easter bunny, hosted by the Wantagh-Levittown Ambulance Corps, last Saturday. Story, more photos, Page 20.

By JENNIFER CoRR jcorr@liherald.com

Jennifer Corr/Herald

David DeRienzo, a senior at General Douglas MacArthur High School in Levittown, has a busy schedule, between working as a barista at a Starbucks in Seaford and leading his school’s Key Club as president. Adding to his list of to-do’s, the Eagle Scout candidate, a member of Troop 330, is taking on an extensive project in the garden at Temple B’nai Torah in Wantagh. DeRienzo, 17, who lives in Levittown, has been a Boy Scout for as long as he can remember, having joined the Cub Scouts in second grade. Now he is earning his Eagle rank at the temple

where he had his bar mitzvah. Being a scout, he said, “has definitely helped improved my maturity a lot, my independence. It was a place where I could be with my friends, expand on my own skills and my own knowledge and also help other people and do what I needed while also improving myself.” The temple’s Social Action/ S o c i a l Ju s t i c e C o m m i t t e e launched what it calls the Giving Garden last May in an abandoned playground that has belonged to the temple for decades. All of the produce grown there is donated to local nonprofits, such as Island Harvest Food Bank, Hempstead’s Continued on page 3

Racist text sparks controversy at Wantagh pizzeria By BRIAN StIEGlItZ bstieglitz@liherald.com

The sidewalk and street outside I Love Pizza, on Wantagh Avenue in Wantagh, became a hotbed of political ire when protesters gathered on Saturday to denounce the way the business handled an incident the previous weekend, in which a delivery driver called a Black customer a racial slur. Lashae Jerry, 25, of Wantagh, and her mother, Monique Hawkins, were in Wantagh Park on March 27 when they ordered from I Love Pizza. It took their order roughly two hours to get to them, so they decided not to tip.

In an expletive-ridden text, which Jerry shared with news outletss, the delivery driver wrote, “Black Lives Matter, but URS [sic] doesn’t,” called her the N word and told her to get out of Wantagh. Jerry said that she started crying, so her mother went back to the pizzeria and demanded an apology. In a since-deleted video she posted on her Facebook page, Hawkins is seen confronting the owner of the pizzeria and demanding that he do something about the racist text. In the video, the owner appears to ignore her demands and continues to make pizza, so Hawkins begins shouting at him,

and he calls the police. When they ar rive and Hawkins explains the situation, the owner says that he has fired the delivery driver, offers Hawkins and her daughter a refund and apologizes. But Hawkins is not satisfied. “The reason why I got so frustrated is because I saw the same man still standing behind the counter,” Hawkins said at the protest, referring to the driver who sent the text. “There were no apologies offered until I went live and started yelling,” she continued. “The employee was not fired or disciplined … and the owner did not offer a refund until I started

yelling, and yes, we did turn the refund down because that’s not going to justify the situation of my daughter being called a” — and here she repeated the slur. The owner declined to comment, or to be identified. Organizers from two local activist groups, Long Island Peaceful Protest and Black, White, Brown United organized

the April 3 protest, which attracted roughly 25 people, to demand that the business undergo sensitivity training and take more steps to ensure that such an incident doesn’t happen again. They were met by a group of counterprotesters of similar size from the conservative political Continued on page 3


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