East Boston

An East Boston man had bail set at $25,000 today at his arraignment on charges he drove into a Revere pedestrian early yesterday, then sped away.

According to the Suffolk County District Attorney's office, a witness who had stopped at the same gas station as Ravida watched Ravida hit and kill Sothany Pen as she was walking home from work shortly before 6 a.m. yesterday:

Boston Police report they are looking for Gerald (Jerry) Govostes, 71, who has not been seen since leaving his home around 8 p.m., Friday.

The victim suffers from dementia, and generally walks from his house to surrounding areas in East Boston such as Constitution Beach, Saratoga Street, Winthrop and Bennington Streets and Dunkin' Donuts.

He was last seen wearing a black leather cap, black, red and white colored plaid long sleeved shirt, khaki pants and gray New Balance sneakers.

If you see him, call detectives at 617-343-4234 or 911.

The Globe reports.

An East Boston man was arraigned on a charge of unarmed robbery today after he allegedly ripped a chain right off another man's neck, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports.

Marquis Allen, 21, is charged with grabbing and pulling the chain around 1:40 p.m. yesterday in Central Square in East Boston. The DA's office reports he allegedly told a booking officer at District A-7:

I'm having a baby. I needed the money.

Bail was set at $1,500.

Innocent, etc.

And the feds swore they'd learned their lesson?

Storm rakes the Back Bay. Photo by Drew.

An astonished Government Center worker e-mailed about the hail around 3:30 p.m. To be more exact, he wrote:

HAILSTONES THE SIZE OF GUMBALLS IN GOV'T CENTER!!!

At least one hailstone the size of a golf ball came down on Washington Street in Downtown Crossing - look at the size of that thing at the end of this video.

Elsewhere, reports poured in end-of-days torrents and pea-sized hail from the Fenway to Chinatown.

A state trooper and police dog were in a cruiser hit by lightning on Perimeter Road at Logan Airport. Both are reported OK, however.

A tree came down on Dartmouth Street near Warren in the South End.

Ground-eye view of the storm, from the BPL main library. Photo by Penny Cherubino.

Ed. note: No hail here on the Roslindale/Hyde Park frontier, but tons of thunder and lightning.

A Jamaica Plain man got cut over his left eye during a struggle with an MBTA Transit Police officer investigating threats against a worker at the Wood Island Blue Line stop last night.

According to a police report, officers got a call around 9:30 p.m. from a customer-service agent at the station about a "loud and disruptive" man whom the CSA said had threatened to kill him. The officers were able to get Gentyrus Gibbs, 36, out of the station, but when they told him to sit down, he instead jumped up and came at one of the officers - who noticed he had a sheathed knife on his right hip. The two battled and both fell to the ground, with Gibbs getting a cut open above his right eye, the report says. As another officer grabbed his legs, the report says, the first cuffed him.

Police say Gibbs refused to let EMTs - or medical personnel at Mass. General - treat his cut and the hospital eventually put him in four-point leather restraints, the report says.

The report does not state what allegedly set Gibbs off.

Innocent, etc.

The Newark Star-Ledger reports a man whose wife was gunned down as the couple walked one of their children down a New Jersey street was arrested today on charges he got an acquaintaince to shoot her - and shoot him as well, just not fatally, to give him an alibi.

WBZ tweets Kashif Parvaiz initially told police the family, with Pakastani roots, was set upon by two blacks and one white who yelled racial epithets before shooting him and his wife, Nazish Noorani. Their 3-year-old son was uninjured.

UPDATE: Arrest imminent, husband may have confessed role in arranging for shooting.

The Newark Star-Ledger reports on the growing number of questions about the death of Nazish Noorani, whose husband claimed to have moved here for PhD work at Harvard, which told the paper it had no records of him being there.

Anthony Lemus, 19, was arraigned Friday in East Boston District Court on charges of armed assault with intent to murder and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon for the Aug. 10 attack near the Sumner Tunnel toll plaza that sent a man to the hospital in critical condition, the Suffolk County District Attorney's office reports.

Bail was set at $25,000.

Prosecutors charge Lemus was one of four men who beat and stabbed a man in a parking lot at 81 Porter St. on Wednesday morning before fleeing in an SUV. The victim is expected to recover, the DA's office says.

Innocent, etc.

Eastie Pride Day is this Saturday at Piers Park.

Boston Police are swarming the area around the Sumner Tunnel and East Boston's Central Square, looking for four men - one reported covered in blood - for a savage attack near the toll plaza around 1:30 p.m.

The Massachusetts Appeals Court today upheld the animal-cruelty law used to send Luigi Epifania of East Boston away for 2 1/2 years.

Epifania had appealed his sentence for his 2007 flaming-cat tossing by arguing the cat didn't belong to anybody in particular and so was not covered by the state law, which only covers animals owned by "another person."

The Longfellow Bridge has its design challenges ahead, and the BU bridge has been no picnic for engineers.

But another bridge in Boston – the Chelsea Street bridge between Chelsea and East Boston – is a simple affair. By the end of the summer, the new bridge, designed by HNTB and built by J.F. White of Framingham, may be complete. It may even happen ahead of schedule.

Although the men working with iron above the river are having no trouble, the men who move mud below it have been facing a dozen daunting engineering tasks for over a year.

They’re all trying to figure out how to make the channel for oil tankers wider. Engineers, pilots, tug captains, oil companies, private landowners, and Coast Guard and Army personnel have been at the drawing board for two years now.

The new bridge, after all, will span the more than 200-ft. wide channel without interruption. That’s thanks to two superstructures that now dominate the Chelsea skyline (anyone can see them from the Tobin Bridge). So the bridge, when opened, might be wide enough to fit a “Panamax” oil tanker headed to the Gulf, Irving and Global tanks upstream.

Historygradguy gets a closeup of the Nantucket light ship, now berthed in East Boston.

Copyright Historygradguy. Posted in the Universal Hub pool on Flickr.

Mark B. recounts the history of the Boston, Revere and Lynn railroad.

The only problem is that Marco Tulio Flores never told anybody about the alleged years of abuse until after Jaime Galdamez's charred, duct-taped body was found in his apartment and Flores was in police custody, prosecutors said today at Flore's second arraignment for murder.

The MetroWest Daily News reports an East Boston man who allegedly posted a Craigslist ad looking for women with troubled pasts for a documentary he claimed to be making is charged with raping a woman who answered the ad, in a Motel 6 on Rte. 9.

Unclear from the story is how or why the woman first reported the crime by flagging down a police officer in Roslindale.

The East Boston Times-Free Press reports the mayor is vowing to go ahead with the $11.3-million project even without the $8-million state grant the city had applied for, but probably won't get.

Last year, BPL trustees had targeted the Orient Heights branch for closure, in part on the assumption the city would build an entirely new branch to replace the tiny building and the neighborhood's other branch.

How is Boston bucking this global-warming thing? A vigilant citizen reports somebody was saving a space on Saratoga Street with a cinder block.

Earlier:

• Somebody in JP still thinks it's winter
• Brighton, too
• And then, of course, there's Philbrick Street in Roslindale

Amelia Earhart and Medford Mayor Edward Larkin exit the Ritz-Carlton in Boston.

In July, 1928, just a month after she became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic (as part of a three-member crew), Amelia Earhart visited the Boston area, where she had worked for a few years as a social worker while living in Medford.

She arrived to throngs of well wishers at the East Boston airport and received roses from the governor on the steps of the State House. And she got a big welcome in Medford. She also took the controls of a smaller plane for a flight from East Boston:

Common Cause Massachusetts is hosting a Redistricting Olympics this summer. We will be taking citizen drawn Congressional, State House, and State Senate maps all summer, evaluating them, declaring a winner, giving out prizes and submitting the winning maps to the MA Legislative Redistricting Committee for consideration.

The purpose of the redistricting Olympics is threefold: to educate the public about the steps in the redistricting process, to initiate public participation in the political arena, and to pressure the legislature to draw the districts so that the citizens are appropriately represented.

Help show the legislature that redistricting is about our interests, not theirs. By participating in our redistricting Olympics and learning how to draw your own fair districts, you can acquire the tools you need to expose attempts by public officials to politicize the state’s new legislative maps.

For more information check out and/or email us at .

Participate in our democracy!

Jessica Lipnack reads about yesterday's Delta collision at Logan and is prompted to post about her own Delta Connection experience last week. No tail shearing, no injuries, but no way to run an airline, either.

Tails get bent.

Nobody's taken responsibility for a jet-fuel spill last fall that ended a decades-long clamming tradition, the East Boston Times-Free Press reports.