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Authorities say the victims had suffered significant head trauma and other serious injuriesA teenager visiting New York with family for spring break was among the four young people found brutally killed in a park in a Long Island neighborhood that has for years contended with a growing problem of gang violence. Jefferson Villalobos was one of the victims found dead in Central Islip Recreation Village Park Wednesday night, his cousin Yensy Fuentes told News 4 Friday. He had been on vacation with his grandmother, and arrived from Pompano, Florida, last Friday, to visit family in Brentwood.Villabolos, who would have turned...

CENTRAL ISLIP, Long Island (WABC) -- The four men who were found brutally murdered in a Long Island park Wednesday night have been identified, as their devastated families mourn the loss of their loved ones. Their mutilated bodies were found at the intersection of Lowell Avenue and Clayton Street in Central Islip, and authorities say one of them was so badly disfigured that he could only be identified through a tattoo. The youngest victim was just 16 years old. "He had a plastic bag over his head in order to suffocate him," said Yensi Fuentes, victim's cousin. "And from what...

MS-13 gang members busted for high school girls’ murders on Long Island Federal authorities and police in Long Island arrested four MS-13 gang members Thursday morning for the murders of three teenagers, a source said. The gangbangers will be charged with the murders of two high school girls who were murdered in Brentwood in September, and the murder of an 18-year-old gang member whose skeletal remains were found in Brentwood in October, the source said. The U.S. attorney was expected to discuss the updated indictment Thursday afternoon in Central Islip. In recent months, more than 30 violent MS-13 gang members...

An attorney with the Internal Revenue Service’s professional standards office in Washington has been charged with conspiring to distribute 500 grams or more of methamphetamine, U.S. prosecutors said. Jack Vitayanon, 41, an IRS attorney since 2012 allegedly participated in a meth ring with others in Arizona and on Long Island between about September 2014 and January, according to a criminal complaint unsealed in Brooklyn federal court Wednesday. Public records show Vitayanon living in the U Street corridor. In the criminal complaint, prosecutors noted that during one alleged transaction, Vitayanon directed a buyer to make a cash deposit of $1,650 to...

The Long Island home that served as the inspiration for the book “The Amityville Horror” and the subsequent films of the same name is being bought. […] Before gaining fame with the release of the original movie in 1979, the house was where 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo Jr. murdered his parents and four younger siblings in 1974. …

September 11, 2001 was a moment deeply etched into the psyche of the American mind. It brought this country together like at no other time in the past. For Geeoge Soros it had a completely different meaning. To Soros it showed that foreign policy under Clinton, Bush and further even in the Obama presidency was arrogant, leading to an anti-American hatred across the globe. Soros himself had decided Bush was “evil” for no other reason than that he called our enemies “evil. Bush also expressed exceptionalism in the American way of governing and in the country in general. Where the...

CENTRAL ISLIP, Long Island (WABC) -- Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano and his wife were arrested Thursday morning in a bribery and kickback scheme that also netted Oyster Bay's town supervisor. Mangano and his wife, Linda, walked out of his Bethpage home without handcuffs just before 7 a.m. Thursday and got into waiting vehicles.

WOODBURY - A News 12 Long Island/Hofstra University poll shows that Long Islanders are divided about who they want to win the presidency. A total of 40 percent said they want Hillary Clinton to be the next president, while 40 percent said they supported Donald Trump. Six percent said they want another candidate, and six percent aren't voting at all. Eight percent of those polled said they were undecided. Political analyst Michael Dawidziak said the result are not surprising. "That's consistent. That's what the polls have been on Long Island almost from the time when these two candidates were chosen,"...

BRENTWOOD, N.Y. — Four dead teenagers. Two weeks. One town. And a ruthless gang, the authorities say, was most likely responsible for the toll. Again. On Sept. 13, Nisa Mickens, 15, and her best friend, Kayla Cuevas, 16, were murdered, their battered bodies found near an elementary school here. A week later and just two miles away, the skeletal remains of two more teenagers — identified as Oscar Acosta, 19, and Miguel Garcia-Moran, 15 — were found in the woods near a psychiatric hospital. Oscar had been missing since May, Miguel since February. Their deaths have been ruled homicides.

Two roadwork signs on Long Island were hacked in what appeared to be pro-Donald Trump messages. […] The portable Highway Department sign on Route 25 in rural Suffolk County asked drivers to “Vote For Donald Trump.” Another state Department of Transportation sign was hacked on Ocean Avenue in Ronkonkoma reading “Trump — Suck One Hillary” before it was removed. Many who saw the sign were outraged. …

A green energy project has some environmentalists seeing red. Solar energy ordinarily wins praise from groups that want to cut greenhouse gases, but a proposed solar project at a defunct Long Island nuclear power plant has stirred outrage because it requires demolishing 350 acres of woodlands.

A New York utility plans to approve a wind farm off eastern Long Island that it says would be the nation’s largest offshore wind energy project built to date. The project would be the first phase of a more ambitious effort to construct hundreds of electricity-producing turbines in the Atlantic Ocean in the coming years. The announcement that the Long Island Power Authority plans to approve a proposed 90-megawatt, 15-turbine wind farm in U.S. waters east of Montauk at a meeting next week was greeted enthusiastically by energy experts, elected officials and environmentalists. […] The U.S. lags behind Europe and...

A struggling liberal arts college that had a striking waterfront campus but fewer and fewer students is closing its doors. Dowling College President Albert Inserra said Tuesday the college, on eastern Long Island, will stop operating at the end of the week. He said months of negotiations aimed at finding an academic partner to help keep it afloat had failed.

Three Suffolk County teens were arrested after allegedly assaulting a 60-year-old man earlier this week. According to police, one teen approached the victim while he was walking along Deer Park Avenue at around 12:55 p.m on May 4. Police said the suspect then punched the victim in the face, causing the man to fall to the ground, unconscious. The suspect then fled the scene with two other teens who were in a car nearby. The victim was left on the side of the road.

Wednesday, April 6, 2016, beginning at 7:00 PM EDT, GOP Presidential candidate Donald Trump will hold a campaign rally in Bethpage, NY at Grumman Studios. With two weeks to go until the New York primary on April 19, this will be Mr. Trump’s first campaign event in his home state of New York. Bethpage is a hamlet located on Long Island within the Town of Oyster Bay in Nassau County, New York, United States, as well as a census-designated place with borders slightly different from those of the hamlet. Population: 16,429. Grumman Studios

Donald J. Trump will pad over his loss in Wisconsin with a large rally in Long Island on Wednesday night, where some 18,000 people have requested tickets and where he will be standing with a number of supporters, organizers said. ”

These are embarrassing times for the nation's criminal justice system; as the Obama administration executes the nation's largest mass release of federal prisoners, it's sending a Long Island fisherman to jail for reeling in too many... Back in 2010 resident Obama signed a measure that for the first time in decades relaxed drug-crime sentences he claimed discriminated against poor and minority offenders. This severely weakened a decades-old law enacted during the infamous crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged urban communities nationwide in the 1980s. As part of the movement the U.S. Sentencing Commission lowered maximum sentences for drug offenders and made...

The residents of Long Island can rest easier in their beds knowing that another dangerous criminal has been taken out of commission thanks to the diligent work of the Justice Department. Anthony Joseph has finally been brought to justice and won’t plague the coastal residents any longer. What was the nature of his crime spree? He failed to properly report the correct number of flounder that he caught on his fishing boat, and for that he’s heading off to jail, spending years on probation and facing more than a half million dollars in fines. Anthony Joseph, a commercial fisherman from...

A county police chief on Long Island, New York, resigned on Tuesday amid an ongoing federal probe into whether he beat a suspect accused of stealing a duffel bag from his car in 2012. James Burke, the chief of Suffolk County, one of the state’s largest by population, stepped down on Tuesday after a 31-year career, his attorney confirmed. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking into the beating allegations, according to a source familiar with the matter. …

YAPHANK, N.Y. — Here in this rural Long Island community, a Nazi summer camp once held parades before American flags and banners bearing swastikas. Nearby streets were named after Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and other leaders of Nazi-era Germany. While the parades are gone and the streets have been renamed, one thing has not changed: The original owners of this tract of land kept a clause in its bylaws requiring the homeowners to be primarily “of German extraction.” That has kept this community of 45 families almost entirely white. It has also left one family frustrated and headed to...