Officers from the Amherst Police Department made a number of arrests this weekend after dispersing large parties on both Friday and Saturday night.
Beginning Friday at noon, police responded to a reported larceny at 229 Main Street. According to police reports, an unknown party stole a neon-green lawn ornamentation used to alert those parking at the address. The incident is currently under investigation.
An hour and a half later the same day, police responded to a reported breaking and entering at 86 Northampton Road. A computer and video game console were missing from the address, and the situation is also currently being investigated, according to police reports.
At 11 p.m. Friday, police responded to a noise complaint at 599 South East Street. Seventy-five people were cleared from the property and residents were issued a citation for noise, according to police officials. One guest was also issued a summons for being a minor in possession of alcohol.
Approximately 45 minutes later, police responded to a disturbance at 500 Sunderland Road. According to police reports, 500-700 people were present at the address and were seen spilling onto the roadway. Officers reportedly shut down the party for safety reasons, citing the large number of people on the road.
“There were taxis backed up two or three on the side of the road,” APD Detective David Foster said. “It was a bad place to have a party.”
When police attempted to clear a crowd of over 45 people from the area, 19-year-old Vineyard Haven resident Aedan Greene reportedly refused to disperse. According to police, Greene turned to face the officers giving the dispersal order and refused to comply with officers’ requests. Police then arrested Greene on charges of riot and failure to disperse.
Another person present, Brian Viscariello of Maynard, was also arrested by police on charges of possession of liquor under the age of 21.
Early Saturday at 1 a.m., police responded to the calls of 23-year-old Framingham resident Kevin Corbin. According to police logs, Corbin called 911 reporting that he was lost. After police located Corbin, he was reportedly taken in to custody and arrested on an outstanding warrant.
Later that day at 3 p.m., officers investigated the breaking and entering of a motor vehicle. According to the police report, the car was unlocked and a GPS and shoulder bag were removed from the car’s inventory. The case is under investigation.
At 8:53 p.m. Saturday, an APD officer pulled over a vehicle being driven by Amherst resident Benjamin Coblyn. The officer who pulled Coblyn over reportedly recognized Coblyn and recalled that his license had been previously suspended. Coblyn was then arrested on the charge of operating a motor vehicle with a suspended license.
Late Saturday night and in to Sunday morning, the APD dealt with another large party. According to the log, police responded to a noise complaint at 665 West Street and arrived to find 250 individuals present and a band playing in the building’s basement. Police issued all three residents of the house citations for noise and nuisance house.
As officers were responding to the West Street party, another officer responded to reports of vandalism occurring at Stacker’s Pub. Police reportedly arrested 36-year-old Amherst resident Robert Auffinger on charges of disorderly conduct and destruction of property. Auffinger was reportedly witnessed punching and breaking the front window of the downtown area pub.
The final arrest of the weekend occurred early Monday morning when police responded to a motor vehicle accident at 81 Meadow Street. According to the police log, a car reportedly crashed into a set of mailboxes at the address. Upon arrival, police found the operator of the motor vehicle passed out in the front seat. The operator, 22-year-old Framingham resident Michael Spellman, was arrested on charges of operating under the influence, operation of a motor vehicle to endanger, marked lines violation and possession of marijuana less than an ounce.
Mitchell Scuzzarella can be reached at [email protected].
N. • Apr 3, 2013 at 6:44 pm
And how about this? Apparently UMass just started subsidizing the APD directly! http://www.wwlp.com/dpp/news/local/hampshire/umass-steps-up-efforts-to-curb-partying
N. • Apr 3, 2013 at 1:18 am
Ed’s post brings up one of the same questions i had… how on earth does ONE person get arrest for “rioting”? I’m not surprised that the Western Mass ACLU doesn’t care what happens here because neither do most of the students. Even the small ‘activist’ community, such as put on Occupy UMass, refused to touch the issue of the heavy-handed response to the Superbowl “Riot” which happened around the same time. There isn’t enough of a collective consciousness to understand what is being done to us collectively. Here is a news story on a report UMA recently released on its disciplining policies: http://www.wwlp.com/dpp/news/local/hampshire/umass-releases-discipline-report
Dr. Ed Cutting • Apr 2, 2013 at 4:28 pm
I hope that every parent considering sending a child to UMass next fall reads this article. I’m not surprised at what happened, just disgusted.
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“Officers reportedly shut down the party for safety reasons, citing the large number of people on the road.”
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OK. Did the officers make any arrangements to transport the 500-700 people back home? All of their plans for transportation back to campus have been made irrelevant by the Amherst Police — who ought to have provided transportation that became necessary because of the police decision. The usual protocol is to call out the town school buses — at 42 adults per bus, they’d needed twenty if they wanted everyone out of there immediately. Did they do it?
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No.
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And if it was considered “unsafe” to have people merely ON the roadway, why wasn’t it considered a whole lot MORE unsafe to have ALL of them on the same roadway — the length of it going back to campus?
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Some people in one small portion of a road versus ALL of them the WHOLE LENGTH OF IT ?!?!?!? No, unless the APD are incredibly stupid, this had nothing to do with safety.
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“’There were taxis backed up two or three on the side of the road,’ APD Detective David Foster said.”
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Interesting. So the rule is that any event that causes traffic congestion is to be shut down? I suspect Easter church services caused some traffic congestion, as do Selectboard meetings. Does the APD shut these down?
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“Aedan Greene reportedly refused to disperse. According to police, Greene turned to face the officers giving the dispersal order and refused to comply with officers’ requests. Police then arrested Greene on charges of riot and failure to disperse.”
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These are criminal charges and Mr. Greene is entitled the full rights of a criminal defendant and I hope he has the courage to fight the charges and pursue it on the appellate level because he will prevail — and then I hope he sues the s*** out of the town.
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The “failure to disperse” is a 1750 British Colonial Ordinance which the State Supreme Judicial Court has never upheld — ever — and at least once essentially said was garbage. “Riot” has a very clear meaning which the APD would have been arresting him for some other stuff had he actually been guilty of it. If the Collegian’s facts are accurate, this is even more outrageous than the Cambridge Police’s arrest of Henry Louis Gates – Gates had at least kicked a door open, albeit of the house he was renting from Harvard.
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I simply do not understand why Bill Newman and the Western Mass ACLU have spent the past decade ignoring the APD’s general rape of the US Constitution, but I digress….
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Furthermore, if Enku even threatens judicial charges, Mr. Greene needs to contact FIRE immediately! http://www.thefire.org, [email protected] and they do have a 1-800 number that I can never remember.
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There is an explicit memo from the Criminal Offender Records people (who are THE authority on the CORI law) that states that UMass simply may not do some of the things it is doing — the SGA has (or had) a copy of this memo. Preparing to advise a student who had been brought up on bogus judicial charges, I called the CORI people and was told, in the most explicit of terms, that the university couldn’t do some of the things it was trying to do.
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We won’t even get into the FERPA violations — you have the right to see absolutely everything in any file that UMass has on you. Oh, and Enku, that includes the secret file on me that you brag about having on me, but continue to tell me that you don’t have. But again I digress.
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I hope every parent even thinking about making the mistake of sending a kid to UMass next fall reads this story and understands three things.
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1: Amherst is essentially under martial law — a UMass student has no “right” to be anywhere.
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2: The Amherst, UMass and Hadley Police treat UMass students in a manner similar to how Bull Connor’s police treated African-Americans. They just are using chemical wheaponry where Bull Connor’s “boys” used firehoses — that’s the ONLY difference between what happened there back then and what is happening around UMass today.
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3: The entire Division of Student Affairs — from Jean Kim on down – is an unmitigated disaster. While I had issues with JoAnne Vanin, she had some good people who were working for her, all three of whom have now retired. And while I had even more issues with Michael Gargano, almost everyone did, Jean Kim is far worse than “Dunk” ever dreamed of being.
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I say this as a person who has a MEd in Student Affairs, which Enku does *not* have. And I believe that Eddie Hull’s degree is in counseling — and I am not making this up, memory is that he has a Master’s degree in School Counseling — Enku has a BA in Journalism and a law degree although she appears to neither be a member of the Massachusetts Bar (http://massbbo.org/bbolookup.php) nor that of the other states where I checked.
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Welcome to UMass, where it is considered unsafe to have some people in the road, but not unsafe to have a whole lot more stumbling along the length of it. Welcome to UMass where you can not only be arrested but likely threatened with expulsion for merely asserting your legal rights as an American citizen and daring to question a police officer.
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I remember the week-long Goodell “occupation” when a group of students occupied the building, “christened” each and every piece of furniture by having sexual intercourse on it (damaging most so badly that all of the then-recently-new office furniture had to be discarded and replaced with new), and were never charged with anything. In fact, the university recognized them as student leaders for their illegal acts.
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I remember what happened when Andy Card was given an honorary degree — for the reason most people get honorary degrees, Card had managed to get a few million dollars more out of the Bush Administration to finish paying for the disaster that was the UMass Telescope in Mexico.
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If Aedan Greene can be arrested (and likely threatened with expulsion) for merely asking a police officer to justify what well may have been an illegal order, I can’t begin to imagine the number of arrests there would have been in just the ’90’s, let alone back in the ’70’s. And I am just waiting to see what happens when the campus unions negotiate their next contract, or when one of them is grieving something.
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Aedan Greene appears to have been arrested for speech — for saying something that the government (i.e. police) didn’t want him to say. That didn’t use to happen at UMass — or *anywhere else* in America.
Larry Kelley • Apr 2, 2013 at 10:30 am
Turns out the large party at 665 West Street is a byproduct of an illegal underground Punk music venue. Maybe they will have to charge a lot more for their next event, April 14.
http://onlyintherepublicofamherst.blogspot.com/2013/04/pro-party-house-of-weekend.html