AFTER-SCHOOL FRAY LEADS TO 7 ARRESTS; SOME FORMER STUDENTS INVOLVED

By Michael O. Allen, Record Staff Writer | Friday, January 10, 1992

The Record (New Jersey) | 5 Star | NEWS | Page B03

A fight involving a handful of current and former Ridgefield Park High School students broke out as a crowd of about 100 students walked home from the school, police said.

Police arrested seven people, including three students, during the fight Wednesday at about 2:30 p.m. at Overpeck Avenue and Union Place, about one-fourth mile west of the high school, Police Chief Walter Grossman said.

The dispute continued that evening in Little Ferry, where one of those arrested in the afternoon filed a simple assault charge against another who was involved in the after-school fight, Little Ferry police said. Little Ferry sends its high school students to Ridgefield Park.

“It’s all individuals who knew each other,” Grossman said. “Some were former students, and somehow or the other we don’t know how it happened they wound up at that intersection at that time.”

“There was a lot of pushing and shoving, some punching, that type of thing,” Grossman added, but he said it was unclear who fought with whom, or why. “That’s the big question. We don’t know if it’s from the past, when they knew each other.”

Charged with disorderly conduct were two 16-year-old boys who are high school students, one from Ridgefield Park, the other from Little Ferry; Lionel Quarales of Ridgefield Park, who was the third student; Horatio Hemmings of Englewood, Lawrence Pfaff of Hackensack, and Christopher Kaplan of Little Ferry, all 18-year-olds; and Amir Hakim-Davoud, 23, of Little Ferry. Hakim-Davoud and Pfaff also were charged with resisting arrest.

“They were all at one point fighting with each other,” Grossman said. “Right now, I couldn’t tell you who was fighting whom. Our officers got there just in time to pull them apart.”

No one was injured.

Later that night, the juveniles were released to the custody of their parents and the adults were released on their own recognizance pending a court date later in the month, the chief said.

“We’ll look into it further to determine why this thing happened,” Grossman said. “Occasionally, we’ve had kids have a little argument here and there, but not with the kind of number that we had here. And, of course, some of the kids were from out of town, which is dangerous.”

Little Ferry Police Capt. Dennis Hofmann said officers responded to a report of a crowd and a disturbance on Main Street at about 8:40 p.m. The crowd had thinned out by the time police arived, but Quarales, alleging that he had been hit with a pipe or a stick, signed a complaint of simple assault against Hemmings, Hofmann said.

ID: 17365615 | Copyright © 1992, The Record (New Jersey)