To hear Michael Blichasz tell it, none of this would have happened if he hadn’t gone asking for a copy of the deed.
City officials never would have come knocking on the door of his nonprofit museum, the Polish American Cultural Center, curious how he came to be the supposed owner of a multimillion-dollar property in the heart of Philadelphia’s historic district.
They never would have begun scrutinizing the decades-long paper trail, the political handshakes, and the forgotten promises made to the once-powerful community leader.
And the quaint Polish history museum that has operated in Society Hill since 1987 would still have its home.
Because for nearly 30 years, City Hall never questioned whether Blichasz’s nonprofit actually owned the building at 308 Walnut St.
“No one mentioned a word about it,” Blichasz, 79, said. “It was totally silent.”
That silence started unraveling seven years ago when, Blichasz said, he requested a copy of the deed in order to get a state grant to make repairs on the five-story property. He had somehow avoided an inquiry for decades, despite securing other grants and contracts to keep alive his nonprofit’s mission: providing Polish immigrants with a one-stop cultural hub that could connect them to city services.
Officials at the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority (PRA) scratched their heads at the request, according to Blichasz. Records showed the authority owned the museum building, not the Polish group.
PRA eventually took Blichasz to court, accusing him of squatting in the property and failing to pay back millions in loan installments. Blichasz said former Mayor W. Wilson Goode and other elected officials in the late 1980s purchased the property for his group and promised to pay off the debt as a gift to the Polish community.
But apparently those promises were never written down.
“The city has no records [or] evidence anyone in the city ever agreed to pay the balance on behalf of [the Polish museum] to obtain ownership of the property,” Jamila Davis, a PRA spokesperson, said in a statement.
Michael Blichasz, president of the Polish American Cultural Center, stands beside a bust of the former Pope John Paul II.
This much both sides agree on: The Polish American Cultural Center came to occupy the historic building thanks to a rare and generous arrangement in 1987.
Goode approved a $2.1 million bond to buy a permanent home for United Polish American Social Services, a nonprofit run by Blichasz that had been aiding the city’s Polish immigrants since the early 20th century.
The grant led to the birth of the city’s first and only Polish museum, where Blichasz amassed an exhibit hall full of national folk art, portraits of famous Poles such as Pope John Paul II, and historical artifacts dating from the first immigrant settlers to these shores in 1608 to the diaspora that followed the 1939 invasion of the Nazis.
But Goode’s act of benevolence came with a caveat: According to the bond agreement, if the Polish group failed to keep up with payments, the city could kill the deal and take back the building. Blichasz claims Goode and other elected officials at the time, many of whom are now dead, promised he would never have to pay a dime.
“They said, ‘You will pay zero,’” he said.
A copy of a $81,875 check Blichasz provided to The Inquirer represents one of the only payments made by the nonprofit to the city — in August 1988. PRA said Blichasz’snonprofit, all told, paid about $155,000 toward the bond taken out by the city, which grew to $4.6 million with interest.
The Goode administration later applied for a federal grant through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to pay off the property, according to records provided to The Inquirer.
Blichasz said he was under the impression the deal was done. But those federal funds never materialized — and the city didn’t seek to settle the debt for decades.
Bicentennial cash and ethnic tensions
The museum’s origins lie in the summer of 1987, when City Hall faced accusations of racial and ethnic favoritism.
The city had just unlocked $2 million left from the 1976 Bicentennial, and Council members had sent half that money to nine Black community groups. Anger simmered among white ethnic leaders like Blichasz.
“Reverse discrimination,” Councilmember Joan Krajewski said at the time.
Critics asserted also that regardless of race, the fund was supporting activities with few ties to America’s birthday celebration — from a Trinidadian steelpan orchestra to a Polish-American festival at Penn’s Landing led by Blichasz.
At the time, however, Blichasz’s nonprofit was also trying to move its headquarters from Fairmountto Philadelphia’s historic district.
And the city had already agreed to pay for the new building.
After the city inked the bond purchase on behalf of the Polish group, Blichasz vowed to increase the nonprofit’s annual budget by 50% to keep up with repayment. Goode promised the group leniency, but newspaper articles from the time show no offer to fully wipe the debt.
Blichasz was confident. Donors in the Polish community, he said, would “respond with joy” to bring this first-of-its-kind museum to life in Philadelphia.
But the joy proved less than hoped.
Months later, Blichasz was back at City Hall asking for a bailout. His group had raised only a fraction of its $1 million goal and needed an additional $350,000 to pay the mortgage and museum build-out costs.
He pointed out that the city had financed capital projects for other ethnic groups, including the Mummers Museum, the African American history museum, and the Jewish museum.
“This is going to tell us just how appreciated the good, taxpaying Poles are by this country,” Blichasz said at the time.
The museum, he promised, would be “an attraction” that would more than repay its debt.
Then Vice President George H.W. Bush visits the Polish American Cultural Center for the opening published on Aug. 10, 1988, in The Inquirer.
Teaching self-sufficiency
The Polish American Cultural Center opened its doors in August 1988 to a flag-waving crowd of 300 people. Then-Vice President George H.W. Bush attended the ribbon-cutting ceremony, where visitors admired hand-cut Polish crystal and other curios from the homeland.
Alongside the museum, the nonprofit continued to provide the community with services that ranged from English language courses to help with rent and fuel rebates — work Blichasz said was “teaching Polish immigrants to be self-sufficient.”
Much of that work was also financed by the city.
Auditors later raised concern over a six-figure contract the Goode administration dealt to the nonprofit. At the time, the arrangement led former city finance director David Brenner to speculate about Blichasz’s political clout: “Where his influence comes from beats the hell out of me, but no question he’s got it.”
At some point, however, concerns over the debt for 308 Walnut St. disappeared.
As far as Blichasz was concerned, it was absolved after Goode applied for the HUD grant.
Blichasz said officials like Krajewski and Goode insisted his group not cut any more checks to the city, saying “we will take care of it.”
Why PRA did not inquire about the outstanding mortgage agreement remains uncertain. A spokesperson did not immediately respond to a question about the matter, and city records show only one inspection of the property, in 2011.
By the time PRA took a renewed interest, Blichasz had a problem: Many of the people who helped facilitate the initial deal were no longer around to help explain.
The outside of the Polish American Cultural Center.
A historic takeback
The museum fell under the radar until Mayor Jim Kenney’s first term. Soon after Kenney took office in 2016, Blichasz recalled, there was a heated meeting after the nascent administration ended his nonprofit’s six-figure social services contract.
He described the city as more interested in “giving out condoms” than providing help to an increasingly elderly Polish population.
Years later, during an insurance audit of large buildings owned by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority, Kenney administration officials were baffled by 308 Walnut St. It’s not clear if the PRA even knew who owned it.
PRA officials toured the building in 2019 and found the museum on the first floor much as it had ever been. But the floors above were in shambles, according to a city employee who toured the property.
The second through fourth floors looked as if their occupants had been raptured, with calendars from the 1980s frozen on the walls and moldy cups of coffee that appeared to date to the same decade.
On the fifth floor, officials said, they found evidence that someone had been sleeping in the building along with boxes of old documents and recording equipment where Blichasz broadcast his Polish American radio hour.
PRA quickly moved to intervene.
“Based on concerning conditions observed during the tour,” PRA said in a statement this week, it hired an engineering firm to document the state of the building. The contractors reported it needed at least $1.8 million to be brought back to code. The lack of maintenance resulted “in potentially dangerous structural issues,” PRA said in a statement.
Blichasz acknowledged water damage from leaks, which he had hoped to repair with state grants. But he called the PRA’s overall assessment of the property a fiction. He said his nonprofit spent “millions” in repairs over the years out of its operating budget.
“It’s very fishy,” Blichasz said of PRA’s inspection.
The agency said in a statement that officials “attempted to negotiate” but that Blichasz “refused to cooperate and repeatedly requested outright ownership” of the property, despite not having complied with the terms of the original deal.
With no legal title, the PRA took the nonprofit to court in 2023. The agency ultimately won, wresting back control of the building. A judge ordered the nonprofit to pay $3.5 million dollars in debt and damages.
This April, the Polish American Cultural Center was evicted.
Michael Blichasz, director of the Polish American Cultural Center museum poses with a bust of astronomer Nicholas Copernicus. Published in the Philadelphia Daily News on Oct. 14, 1988.
Last chance to cut a deal
As the city clawed back the property, Blichasz accused officials of negotiating in bad faith. He also suggested it was a racially motivated attack against his organization to divert funding to nonwhite community groups.
Those who could attest to the original deal are dead or not talking. Krajewski, the former Council member, died in 2013. Blichasz said he hadn’t reached out to Goode in years. Phone calls to the former mayor were not returned.
“When those people were alive, we could have had a nice get-together, a hearing,” Blichasz said. “Now they want to take me to court. I said, ‘Why? You never sat down with us to discuss this.’ All I want to do is keep the original mission and goals alive.”
The ordeal has interested at least one current elected official.
Councilmember Mark Squilla, who represents the area, has acted as a liaison between Mayor Cherelle L. Parker and Blichasz this year. Emails shared with The Inquirer showed that Blichasz turned down three compromise options from Parker that would have either allowed the Polish group to remain in the building under a new lease or helped pay for the group’s relocation.
Squilla acknowledged that the paperwork didn’t support Blichasz’s case. But he argued that his decades of contributions to the city should be considered, too.
“After we did some background research, I figured there’s no way we could find out what really happened,” Squilla said. “So I figured, ‘Why don’t we just work out a deal?’ And unfortunately, the deals that the PRA made were not accepted by the Polish museum folks.”
Squilla introduced a resolution in City Council on Oct. 9 to hold hearings on the PRA’s treatment of Blichasz.
“After 30 years, I believe that they had the right to stay in and use the building,” the Council member said.
On Wednesday, a woman approached the doorway of the museum, asking if it was open.
Inside, standing in the wood-paneled hallway that harkened back to another era, a maintenance worker shooed her away.
It’s a local tradition as predictable as slow-rolling through a South Philly stop sign or cursing Schuylkill Expressway traffic: Each election season, the Philadelphia Bar Association publishes its carefully considered opinion of the sitting judges up for reelection — then, the voters ignore it and send every incumbent back to the bench.
That’s because, since 1969, judicial retention elections have been yes-or-no votes for each judge rather than head-to-head competition. In that time, only one Philadelphia Common Pleas Court judge has ever been denied another term — and he was already facing removal for misconduct in a high-profile case. He “had to work damn hard to lose that election,” retired Common Pleas judge Benjamin Lerner said.
In September, the bar’s Commission on Judicial Selection and Retention issued its advice for the Nov. 4 election, recommending 13 out of the 18 judges seeking reelection to Philadelphia’s Common Pleas and Municipal Courts. Other than noting that three of the five “not recommended” judges had not participated in the review process, the bar — as is typically the case — released no further information about its decisions.
But this year, The Inquirer obtained the confidential survey responses the association collected from hundreds of lawyers. The attorneys — who practice in Philadelphia’s criminal, civil, and family courts — provided the bar with detailed feedback under the cover of anonymity about the sitting judges. They also answered yes-or-no questions about their confidence in each judge’s integrity, legal ability, temperament, diligence, attentiveness, and general qualification for the job.
The Inquirer followed up on the issues raised in the survey by interviewing lawyers and judges, watching weeks of court hearings, and reviewing a decade of Superior Court decisions.
The survey results and The Inquirer’s examination offer voters a rare window into how members of Philadelphia’s legal community view the performance of the judges up for retention next month. It has been at least 40 years since such inside information was made available to the public.
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The judges earning the bar association’s recommendation include several on Common Pleas Court with near-unanimous support: Family Court Judges Walter Olszewski, Ourania Papademetriou, and Christopher Mallios; and Judge Ann Butchart, who handles civil cases.
Olszewski is a “wonderful, caring, intelligent jurist,” one lawyer wrote. “A true public servant.”
The majority of the judges received the bar’s recommendation despite feedback that was mixed, though generally positive.
The most polarizing was Judge Tracy Brandeis-Roman, who has faced blistering appeals from the district attorney’s office accusing her of a pro-defendant bias. Two-thirds of lawyers surveyed said Brandeis-Roman is qualified, and some referred to her as a “fair and compassionate” jurist. But others called her biased and “ill-informed on the law.”
Brandeis-Roman declined to comment.
The judges who received the harshest criticism — and whom the bar ultimately declined to recommend — were faulted for their demeanor, disciplinary histories, or disregard for legal procedures.
“She was cruel and condescending to my client,” a lawyer wrote of Common Pleas Court Judge Lyris F. Younge, who faced parent protests in 2018 and was later sanctioned by the state Court of Judicial Discipline.
“Incapable, even after all of the years of being on the bench, of making an appropriate decision expeditiously,” another said of Common Pleas Court Judge Frank Palumbo.
Younge and Palumbo did not respond to requests for comment.
Marc Zucker, who chairs the bar’s Commission on Judicial Selection and Retention, said the anonymous survey has no bearing on the final recommendations. Instead, he described it as a jumping-off point for an extensive process in which more than 100 volunteer investigators interview candidates, other judges, and lawyers. They also scrutinize judges’ written opinions, social media posts, and financial disclosures.
“We don’t take any criticism at face value,” Zucker said. “We try and look behind it, and hear multiple voices addressing each of those matters.”
That information is kept private, he said, to encourage candor.
The bar’s work does seem to have an influence on voters in competitive primaries. In May, only candidates it recommended won primaries for Common Pleas Court judge.
But the stakes are high. Local judges “make decisions that have a huge impact on our communities,” Cristella said. “Everyone knows someone who’s had a custody hearing, or had to appear in traffic court. People have all kinds of reasons to be before a judge.”
Here is what voters should know about some of the more notable judges up for retention on Nov. 4:
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When Palumbo first ran for judge in 1999, he was best known as the son of a famous Philly power broker and nightclub owner. The bar association declined to recommend him, but Palumbo drew the top ballot position and cruised to victory. Since then, he has been reelected twice without the bar’s support.
This year, survey participants complained that Palumbo is erratic and indecisive. One lawyer wrote that getting through a daily list of cases “is an immense struggle for him.” Another claimed he “purposefully blows up negotiated pleas in his room so he does not have to take them.”
The Superior Court has overturned about one-quarter of cases it decided on appeal from Palumbo’s courtroom over the last decade, well above the statewide average of 13%.
A reporter sat in Palumbo’s courtroom on five occasions in August and September. By the time he arrived around 10:30 a.m., most matters had already been resolved by agreement.
One day, the prosecutor and the public defender informed Palumbo that, in his absence, they had agreed on the outcome of every single case: In minutes, Palumbo’s work on the bench was done.
But when the lawyers in the matters before him did not reach a complete agreement, as was the case on Aug. 27, Palumbo launched into circuitous legal questioning that stymied what might have been a routine proceeding.
On that day, Palumbo took the bench at 10:40 a.m. and asked, “Is everything worked out?”
The lawyers told him there was just one outstanding matter: A man on probation had agreed to plead guilty in a gun case, and they wanted Palumbo to order a presentence investigation and schedule a sentencing for a future date. Instead, Palumbo questioned why the case was in his courtroom, offered to transfer it to another judge, and then aborted the proceeding, saying he could not accept the plea without the man’s probation file in hand.
After the prosecutor complained, Palumbo offered, twice more, to transfer the case elsewhere. “I can just move it to the trial room,” he said.
Generally speaking, lawyers on both sides find it difficult to navigate judges who unilaterally delay or derail proceedings, said Dana Bazelon, a former Philadelphia defense lawyer and policy director for the district attorney’s office, who is now a fellow at the Quattrone Center of the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School.
“There are judges who really struggle to make decisions who are currently sitting — and that is as basic a tenet of the job as there is,” she said. “You can’t really do the job if you can’t make decisions.”
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After a jury returned a guilty verdict against Stephen Jones in a child sexual assault case this May, the victim’s family felt a moment’s relief. Then Brandeis-Roman handed down her sentence.
The outcome was not unusual for Brandeis-Roman. Philadelphia’s district attorney’s office has appealed more than two dozen of her rulings, arguing that her sentences are too lenient and that her decisions have a pro-defendant bias. It’s a notable trend given that the office, under D.A. Larry Krasner, is considered one of the most progressive in the country.
The Superior Court has so far decided 17 of those cases appealed by prosecutors. Sixteen of them were overturned, including a guilty jury verdict Brandeis-Roman had tossed out despite what the Superior Court called “uncontradicted and overwhelming” video evidence tying the defendant to a shooting.
Krasner’s office is appealing another Brandeis-Roman decision to vacate a jury’s guilty verdict in a sexual assault trial.
At what was supposed to be the sentencing hearing for that case, the judge instead threw out the verdict, saying that the evidence did not support the jury’s finding and that the defendant might not have known the victim was incapacitated. The prosecutor’s appeal argued that Brandeis-Roman usurped the role of the jury, took a “thoroughly slanted view,” and disregarded testimony that the woman had been so drunk that her friends had to clean up her vomit and put her to bed.
Marian Braccia, a Temple University law professor and former Philadelphia prosecutor, said it is rare to see a judge overrule a jury in that manner and requires a finding that no reasonable jury could have reached that verdict.
For that to happen repeatedly, she said, “really undermines the reliability of the whole system.”
The lawyers responding to the bar’s survey who praised Brandeis-Roman cited her diligence, compassion, and unyielding commitment to justice.
“Constantly bullied by the [district attorney’s office] and yet still has the self-respect and respect for fairness to be kind and stand up to them. Holds everyone to the same standard,” one lawyer wrote.
Setting aside the prosecution’s appeals, the appellate court has affirmed more than 90% of her rulings.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, continue to file motions urging Brandeis-Roman to reconsider what they say are light sentences.
In one September case, she sentenced Eladio Vega — a 33-year-old man convicted of beating a pregnant woman, causing her to miscarry and breaking her jaw — to a brief jail term, followed by probation and drug treatment.
The prosecutor had requested five to 10 years in prison for Vega, given previous convictions for domestic incidents that included breaking his mother’s wrist. But Brandeis-Roman, noting that Vega had survived child abuse and mental illness, said state prison “would absolutely be adding to the trauma.”
She acknowledged that her decision went against state guidelines: “On paper,” she said, giving him a lighter sentence “doesn’t make sense.”
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Then a relatively new Family Court judge hearing child-welfare cases, Younge had come to the bench with deep expertise in child welfare, having worked as a lawyer for the City of Philadelphia and an executive in the Philadelphia Department of Human Services.
But, among other complaints, the protesting parents said Younge had shut them out of proceedings. One mother who became ill during a hearing stepped out of the room, and Younge would not allow her to return, terminating her parental rights in her absence.
The Superior Court reversed a spate of the judge’s decisions, finding Younge abused her discretion in throwing a grandmother in jail and handcuffing a mother while her kids were removed.
One appellate decision cited “example after example of overreaching, failing to be fair and impartial, evidence of a fixed presumptive idea of what took place, and a failure to provide due process to the two parents involved. … The punishment effectuated by [Younge] was, at best, neglectful and, at worst, designed to affect the bond between Parents and [child] so that termination would be the natural outcome of the proceedings.”
Instead of child-welfare matters, Younge is now hearing civil cases. Over her tenure, the Superior Court has overturned about 27% of the cases appealed from her courtroom, double the statewide average.
Younge did not participate in the bar’s process or respond to requests for comment from The Inquirer.
In the survey, most lawyers brought up concerns with her record in Family Court. Those who had been in her civil courtroom gave mixed feedback.
“Those patterns and practices are still present in her civil courtrooms,” one lawyer wrote. “No party, on either side, gets a fair trial.”
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Presiding mostly over post-conviction reviews in criminal court, DiClaudio inherited a docket that included cases pending for a decade or longer, and he said he prided himself on his hard work and efficiency in clearing that backlog. He has noted that his record includes overturning roughly 50 homicide convictions.
Lawyers surveyed about DiClaudio were divided, with many criticizing his courtroom demeanor even as they said he “knows the law and gets to the right conclusions.” The Superior Court has overturned his rulings in only about 7% of cases.
But DiClaudio’s decade on the bench has been marked by controversy, including three cases the Judicial Conduct Board brought against him.
In the first case, from 2019, the board said DiClaudio ignored court orders related to a lawsuit over unpaid membership dues he owed to a sports club. DiClaudio was given a two-week suspension and placed on judicial probation until 2026.
This year, the board argued that DiClaudio had improperly used his office to promote his wife’s cheesesteak shop and “traded on and abused the prestige of his office for the personal and economic benefit of himself and others.”
While a final decision on that case was pending, fellow Common Pleas Court Judge Zachary Shaffer alleged that DiClaudio tried to influence his sentencing decision in a gun case by showing Shaffer a piece of paper with the name of a defendant and saying, “I’ve heard you might do the right thing anyway.”
Court supervisors placed DiClaudio on administrative leave, and the Judicial Conduct Board pushed for his suspension without pay on the grounds that his continued employment as a judge would “erode public confidence in the judiciary.”
DiClaudio stipulated to various missteps in the 2019 case related to the club debt, but he has denied any wrongdoing in the two pending cases. DiClaudio denied trying to influence Shaffer, and his lawyer insisted that he had not sought to sway the judge but had happened to mention the defendant in passing when Shaffer stopped by his chambers to buy a T-shirt from the cheesesteak shop.
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A former criminal-defense lawyer, Grey was recommended by the bar when he first ran for judge in 2015.
Some survey respondents praised him for his commitment to families. But lawyers also raised concerns about his temperament, saying he yells at litigants and interrupts testimony.
“Judge Grey’s judicial performance is highly dependent on his mood, which varies widely from day to day,” one lawyer wrote. “He is also frequently aggressively impatient with attorneys, social workers and adult parties. Great with kids.”
An Inquirer review of Superior Court decisions found Grey had the highest reversal rate of any judge in Family Court’s juvenile division. In several opinions, appellate judges said Grey returned children home to dangerous situations — in one case going so far as to say they were “appalled” by Grey’s decision.
In an interview, Grey acknowledged some errors but said in most cases, his decisions were properly grounded in the available evidence and the law.
As for occasionally yelling, he said it’s warranted.
“I’ve yelled at attorneys for not knowing what’s going on or being prepared,” he said.
Grey said that allowing himself to become emotionally involved is crucial to building connections, and that it is incumbent on him to get involved in asking questions and guiding testimony so that he has all the information he needs to decide cases.
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Frazier-Lyde is the only Municipal Court candidate up for retention whom the bar declined to recommend.
It’s unlikely to affect her chances at the polls. In the last election cycle, she won by the largest margin of any Municipal Court judge.
The former champion boxer — and daughter of a Philly legend, Smokin’ Joe Frazier — is often responsible for reviewing defendants’ bail terms and handling preliminary hearings, including in domestic violence cases.
Frazier-Lyde, in an interview, said she is proud of her work on the bench and in the community, and she said she felt blindsided by the bar’s failure to recommend her. She noted the association’s magazine praised her in a feature in its spring 2025 issue as “kind, empathetic and outwardly focused.”
“I have public interest and public welfare at the forefront of how I look at everything,” Frazier-Lyde said, adding that she had heard no complaints from the legal community or her supervisors, who in recent months have asked her to handle a double caseload.
But lawyers who responded to the survey said Frazier-Lyde often ignores procedural rules, such as when she questions witnesses after both sides have rested.
She disagreed with that assessment. “I follow the law. I know the law,” she said.
Survey respondents also questioned her handling of domestic violence cases, reporting that she had ordered victims and their alleged abusers into couples counseling. Frazier-Lyde said she does not order anyone into counseling but does seek expert evaluations to determine whether counseling is warranted.
She also frequently imposes mutual stay-away orders on both defendants and complainants — even extending that to unspecified “friends, family, and associates” on both sides, advising that any violation could result in criminal charges.
Frazier-Lyde said it’s her job to do all she can to keep everyone safe before trial, and such orders help achieve that.
Bazelon, the Penn Law fellow, said it can become impossible to prosecute domestic violence cases if judges see their role as mediating an interpersonal conflict rather than assessing the evidence in an alleged crime.
“Many people see domestic violence as not real crime,” she said. “But when judges bring that to the bench, it means they’re not taking victims seriously enough, and it has the potential to put people in danger.
—Staff writers Dylan Purcell and Chris A. Williams contributed to this article.
Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the terms of Eladio Vega’s sentence.
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Ray the Nubian goat has come a long way since a parasite threatened to take his life, leaving him with three legs but not dampening his spirit. Now he’s in need of a wheelchair.
As a jolly middle-aged goat, 7-year-old Ray loved taking long strolls around Awbury Arboretum, supporting people in bereavement with hoofshakes and kisses, and taking children with cerebral palsy on rides.
The wagon was his biggest job, and he took it seriously, said Karen Krivit, the director of Philly Goat Project, an East Germantown nonprofit that provides community wellness through nature connection. So much so that he hid his pain.
“Goats tend to hide their injuries,” Krivit said. “Ray was determined to keep from showing any pain and just trying to pull his head high and be with everybody else.”
Philly Goat Project’s annual Christmas Tree-Cycle feeds old trees to goats.
Ray had been battling a parasite infection common among outdoor animals, Krivit said. But, as often happens for hisbreed, he was resistant to the medication. As his veterinarian team continued trying for a cure, a slight limp alerted the Philly Goat Project staff that his condition had worsened.
The parasite affected his bone density, causing one of his femurs to break in three places. A big problem for any goat due to their rough-and-tumble nature.
The place Ray had called home since he was 3 months old rallied around him, raising money for a titanium plate to secure the bone in place. But his anatomy once again worked against him.
With Ray standing at a little over 3 feet tall, his natural lanky composition would have made it hard for the plate and the screws to hold onto the bone. The titanium plate could have collapsed his bone in another area, causing additional damage, Krivit said.
“We were able to eliminate the parasite, but not in time enough to save his leg,” she added. “The safest long-term plan was amputation.”
For tall animals in particular, it’s hard to thrive on three legs, Krivit explained. The biggest challenges since the amputation in May have been teaching him how to move around by himself and reintegrating him into his herd of 13 goats.
“Humans tend to be mean to each other if you look different or act differently; it’s the same with goats,” Krivit said. “But humans can use their voices and talk about it; goats can only be mean and exclude another goat. Not being rejected is vital to his survival.”
Ray was placed in a nearby separate stall. His brother Teddy never stopped looking out for him.
Ten thousand dollars and months of rehabilitation later, Ray has a severe limp, but can now stand up and lie down by himself. The herd has accepted him back, but he seems to feel left behind when they go on long walks, often bellowing as the other goats head out without him.
“Because he is moving his body in three legs instead of four, he is at risk for hurting himself further if he goes on a long walk, making it harder for him to stay connected to the herd,” Krivit said.
So Ray needs a wheelchair.
For goats, that involves a metal harness with a wheel on each side of the goat, mimicking a leg. But they are expensive.
The Goat Project needs $2,000 for a custom-made wheelchair for Ray, physical therapy, and proper fitting.
For Krivit, leaving her beloved otherwise-healthy goat without a wheelchair is not an option. She is hoping to raise enough money at the group’s annual GOAToberFest to get him a chair.
The Oct. 18 event will take place at the Conservatory at Laurel Hill West Cemetery, and tickets run for $75, with free snacks, drinks, and goodie bags.
Until then, she hopes folks can see in Ray a symbol of resilience.
“A wheelchair is the missing link for him to safely go on walks that will support his body and his spirit to not be left behind,” Krivit said. “If Ray can be resilient and he can survive this, I hope that gives people hope in their times of adversity.”
Krivit hopes their upcoming annual GOAToberFest can help get Ray a wheelchair.
As Vladimir Putin blocks peace talks, Kyiv wants to share with the U.S. and Europe how to counter the AI-driven weapons of the future.
Betsyk, commander for the 3rd Separate Assault Brigade's special battalion for intercepting enemy drones, sits beside downed Russian reconnaissance drones.3rd Separate Assault Brigade
DIRECTION POKROVSK, Ukraine — In a warren of rooms filled with computers, 3D printers, colorful wires, and drone frames, the atmosphere was casual, but the intentions were deadly.
The young men in their 20s and 30s, dressed in cargo pants and T-shirts, wouldn’t have looked out of place at a Silicon Valley start-up. Except they were fighting for their lives — and their country’s survival.
In the basement command center, three of the soldier-techies stared at multiple screens with dozens of views delivered by Ukrainian-made surveillance drones. They were looking for Russian targets in a war that had lasted for three and a half years.
As I peered over their shoulders during a June visit to the rear of the front lines, a moving car was spotted.
Orders were quickly passed to a frontline drone navigator and pilot in a trench or basement who would make the final call as to whether the target was clearly visible and worth destroying — at which point the pilot’s goggles would let him watch the little exploding drone descend until a flash signaled another kill.
It was a slow day, and everyone’s attention had turned to other screens before I could learn the fate of the car. But there were always more targets to find.
By my side, the 31-year-old commander of an elite drone battalion of the 59th Assault Brigade, call sign Condor, told me there are up to 300 targets a day, which can range from a single fighter in the grass to a moving motorcycle to a small Russian dugout covered with branches or nets.
“The orcs outnumber us, and they don’t care about loss of lives,” Condor said, using the name of the grotesque enemy warriors in the Lord of the Rings series to refer to the Russians. “In this new way of war, infantry and artillery and mortars still matter, but everything is controlled by air. Now, a military is just a way of supporting drones.”
For Ukraine, drones are an essential part of why the country has been able to hold out so long against an army four times its size.
Source: Institute for the Study of War and AEI's Critical Threats Project.John Duchneskie/Staff Artist
The technology of unmanned weaponry is advancing at a pace that appears revolutionary — from aerial drones to drones that move by sea, robotic land drones, and long-range drones carrying missiles — all increasingly directed by artificial intelligence.
Sea drones drove Russian ships out of the Black Sea along the Ukrainian coast, and continue to strike at the critical Kerch Bridge connecting Russia to Crimea. In June, Ukrainian security services conducted the amazing Operation Spiderweb, which damaged or destroyed up to 40 Russian warplanes worth billions of dollars, deep inside Russia — all with 117 small drones costing $500 each.
But Russia is catching up. Ukraine needs the funds to massively scale up drone production.
That’s why the most important moment of President Donald Trump’s Monday meeting with Ukraine’s president and top European leaders may have been when Volodymyr Zelensky proposed to share his country’s breakthrough drone technology with the Pentagon.
Kyiv would sell tens of billions of dollars’ worth of advanced Ukrainian-made drones to America, and, in return, would buy double that dollar amount of U.S. weapons systems, financed by Europe. Both countries would then be far better equipped for the challenges of modern conflict.
The success of that proposal could bolster American preparedness for future tech wars, while helping Ukraine survive as a free, sovereign state.
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The president could have used America’s power to force Vladimir Putin to negotiate seriously. Instead, he opened the door to blaming Ukraine for any failed "peace" talks.
Why so? Peace talks are going nowhere. Vladimir Putin has no interest in peace. He thinks he’s winning.
The Russian dictator “has no reason to compromise so long as the president refuses to apply any pressure on Moscow,” as former Russian political prisoner Vladimir Kara-Murza bluntly told MSNBC. “You cannot make peace by placating Russia.”
Despite the effusive red-carpet welcome Trump gave Putin at their recent Alaska summit, the Russian leader has rejected every one of the president’s proposals to end the war.
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No ceasefire. No strong security guarantees for Kyiv, as the naive White House negotiator Steve Witkoff claimed Putin had accepted. The Kremlin has already rebuffed a possible bilateral meeting between Putin and Zelensky that Trump has been touting.
Peace talks will become plausible only if the U.S. joins Europe in putting maximum pressure on Russia, convincing Putin he can’t win and can’t afford to fight any longer.
But that would require Trump to recognize what the Europeans already know: Ukraine has been able to hold off the Russians until now because it has pioneered a revolutionary new way of warfare — the war of drones.
So Zelensky’s proposal is in both countries’ interests. The U.S. is way behind in small drone production, but it has weapons systems crucial to Ukraine. A swap would signal to Putin that Trump is not a pushover.
If Trump wants to be a peacemaker, he must recognize that the Ukraine war is about far more than real estate. It is a battle over freedom, geopolitics — and who will win the tech wars of the future.
As I was told by former Ukrainian Minister of Strategic Industries Oleksandr Kamyshin: “This war started like the Second World War with drones. But it will finish as the First World Drone War.”
A pilot with the elite drone unit for HUR, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s intelligence service, demonstrates drone control.Trudy Rubin/Staff
In the air
My latest Ukraine visit — my fifth since the fighting began in February 2022 — showed me what it means when unmanned drones take over the battlefield.
Last year, I could still visit artillery emplacements and destroyed villages near the front where army units lived, showered outdoors, and ate outdoors. I could drive on roads to and from towns near the Donetsk front line inside the contested parts of the eastern Donbas region that Ukraine still controls. Military vehicles still sped along those roads.
Those days are over.
The 15 kilometers (roughly nine miles) on each side of the front line have become a kill zone where almost nothing moves on land because it is at risk of being hit by the other side’s drones.
The size of the kill zone keeps expanding.
Tanks are sitting ducks. So are medical evacuation vehicles. Indeed, military vehicles of any kind. No longer are the soldiers who man frontline positions or drone pilots rotated every day or two; they stay in place for days because the roads in and out are so risky.
Supplies are brought in and the wounded taken out by unmanned robotic carts, known as land drones. These robots also lay mines, and some are equipped with machine guns or rockets.
As for Ukraine’s cities, Putin is demonstrating how drones can be used as a cheap, terrifying tool of terror against civilians.
During my stay in Kyiv, the nightly Russian barrage of Shaheds — drones designed in Iran and gifted by the thousands to Putin by the ayatollahs — rained down nightly on civilian targets. I was lucky to be in a hotel with a comfortable basement shelter, but my Ukrainian friends and contacts were up each night huddled in their hallways or bathrooms. They still are.
Natalya Dubchek stands next to a minibus destroyed by a Shahed drone. The fire from the explosion torched her home in Odesa, Ukraine.Trudy Rubin / Staff
In Odesa one morning, I visited a neighborhood where a family of three was incinerated when a Shahed sheared off the top floor of their apartment building in a residential neighborhood. I spoke with a woman whose bungalow burned to its concrete walls, and who barely escaped the flames.
Even after my return to the U.S., I have kept the air raid alerts on my iPhone, which can be set to any city or region. My phone buzzes every time Russia launches another swarm of Shaheds (along with cruise and ballistic missiles) against Kyiv. For hours, the alerts go off every 20 minutes.
Each buzz means Ukrainian civilians, including the elderly and mothers with small children, must decide whether to descend to an underground shelter and spend miserable hours or the entire night there.
The Shaheds, which give off a chilling whine as they fly, are now copied and manufactured inside Russia with Tehran’s technical help. They have been made more lethal with the addition of jet engines, which enable them to fly higher and faster and elude countermeasures. They are meant to terrorize, exhaust, and kill civilians in Ukrainian schools, hospitals, markets, and apartment buildings.
The number of Shaheds in the skies has jumped dramatically since Putin concluded that Trump will never be serious about punishing Russia for its refusal to accept a ceasefire or engage in serious peace talks. And they are affecting morale. If the Russian barrage continues, more Ukrainians may try to leave for abroad.
A Ukrainian officer shows a thermobaric charge from a downed Shahed drone in a research laboratory in an undisclosed location in Ukraine in 2024.Efrem Lukatsky
Yet, despite the daily Shahed carnage and recent Russian gains on long stalemated front lines, Moscow is still not winning this war.
A prime reason is that Ukraine’s war of technology has so far enabled Kyiv to hold its defensive line, but not to take back territory.
Former Ukrainian commander in chief, now ambassador to the U.K., Valerii Zaluzhnyi, told a video forum in Kyiv that the only war Ukraine can wage is a “high-tech war of survival” until it destroys Russia’s military and economic ability to keep fighting over the long run.
The bad news is that Russia is learning from Ukraine and receiving large-scale tech aid, components, and ready-made drones not only from Iran, but from its other allies, China and North Korea.
This alliance of dictators is growing stronger, and its members are watching the Ukraine war for lessons in future drone warfare with the West. Think China and Taiwan.
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To shake up the Kremlin, Kyiv needs to vastly scale up its drone production and race to outdo the Russians with innovation, especially interceptors that can destroy Shaheds and fiber-optic drones.
European governments and private companies are entering agreements to jointly produce drones, both in Ukraine and in Europe. They are studying Kyiv’s technological advances, including on the front lines.
Ukraine wants to share its invaluable battle-tested knowledge with Washington, yet Trump still appears hung up on the vain hope that Putin “wants a peace deal,” which he mistakenly believes would entitle him to a Nobel Peace Prize.
So long as he refuses to recognize Kyiv’s importance as a strategic ally, the president undermines not only Ukraine’s security but ours.
A Ukrainian serviceman of 57th motorised brigade controls an FPV drone at the frontline in Kharkiv region, Ukraine in August.Andrii Marienko
Drone expansion
In June 2024, when I first met with then-infantry commander Condor of the 59th Assault Brigade in one of the hottest combat zones in eastern Ukraine, he was struggling to arm his depleted battalion. They were suffering through a terrible “shell hunger,” he told me, after the U.S. Congress had frozen military aid for six months. His men were often reduced to firing one artillery shell for every 10 fired by the Russians.
“Every day of [congressional] delay cost broken lives and deaths,” the former history teacher turned soldier said bitterly, as we sat in a dark, virtually empty cafe in the countryside near Pokrovsk. “So, we had no other choice but to be creative.”
To fend off a brutal Russian adversary with four times their population and massive industrial might, the nation’s techies and grunts turned their front lines and hidden basements into a tech incubator for modern war.
Desperate fighters, like Condor’s unit, were already using simple Chinese-made commercial drones to spy on Russian forces in 2023 and 2024.
Every unit I visited near the front during those years had guys working on benches in abandoned farmhouses or workshops, putting together drones from parts purchased on Amazon with their own salaries, or donated by families, friends, or private charitable foundations.
While Ukraine was well known in peacetime for talented engineers and a deep tech sector, many of those early do-it-yourself builders had no such background, but figured things out as they went.
By the summer of 2024, the men of Condor’s unit had come up with how to turn small commercial or DIY drones into little exploding drones.
Call sign Condor, commander of the UAV Forces Battalion of the 59th Assault Brigade.Trudy Rubin / Staff
“We cut sewage pipes and stuffed them with explosives,” Condor explained. “We did the same with energy drink cans.”
These makeshift mini bombs were then affixed to UAVs, the shorthand for unmanned aerial vehicles, mostly small Chinese DJI MAVIC quadcopters, the kind Americans use to record panoramic overhead views of weddings. The Ukrainians launched them at Russian tanks, artillery positions, and trenches.
“This is the art of war,” Condor said, with a grim smile. “When you have no supplies, you have to innovate.”
The turning point came in 2024, when the U.S.-induced shell hunger spurred a massive expansion of drone use to save Ukraine’s army. The goal was to protect and preserve precious frontline man power in a war in which Russia treats soldiers like cannon fodder — and to do so with weapons far cheaper than what they destroy.
Government and private companies produced two million drones in 2025, and are set to manufacture more than four million next year. They could produce eight million to 10 million, Zelensky has said, if they had enough funds.
Other weaponry still plays an important role, especially air defenses. While drones can hold the defensive line, taking territory still requires infantry. But 80% or more of the Ukrainian strikes on the front line are now made by drones.
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Those early exploding drones have evolved into larger attack drones with bigger payloads, including sea drones that resemble large rowboats filled with electronics and sometimes carrying rockets. Robotic ground drones are now mounted with machine guns, and larger long-distance drones can carry small missiles. All of these drones are unmanned and directed by pilots and navigators using goggles and tablets.
Anything that can be viewed by FPVs — first-person view drones in which pilots wearing special goggles can see exactly what the drone sees — is now vulnerable to drone attacks, including men, artillery, ships, helicopters, and low-flying planes.
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In the process, Ukraine has rewritten the rules of ground, sea, and air conflict.
As the war continues, artificial intelligence is certain to take on more of the piloting responsibilities (although target decisions will still be made by pilots and commanders, for now).
So crucial have drones become to modern warfare that the Ukrainian military has a new branch up and running whose task is coordinating drone warfare, called the Unmanned Systems Forces.
“We are the first country with an unmanned forces command,” I was told by Hanna Gvozdiar, deputy minister for Ukraine’s Ministry for Strategic Industries. She estimated Ukraine now produces 300 different varieties of drones.
Moreover, special drone units within most Ukrainian battalions have become central to every element of the conflict. Not only do many of them design their own drones, but they also provide constant updates to private drone manufacturers so they can stay ahead of Russian defenses.
As for Condor, he moved from commanding infantrymen to leading the UAV Forces Battalion of the same 59th Assault Brigade, one of the top drone units in the country. By the time I saw him in June, he was fighting a totally different war.
A worker inspects a combat drone at Fire Point's secret factory in Ukraine in August.Efrem Lukatsky
Advantage Ukraine
In the “genesis space” of a modern, glass-fronted office building in Kyiv, a group of start-up Ukrainian tech entrepreneurs has come to pitch their products to guests from the European Union — and to anyone who might fund them to scale up.
The program is sponsored by Brave1, a government-supported tech incubator that helps connect drone start-ups with investors and provides seed money for promising new projects.
“We are in a race with the Russian drone ecosystem,” I was told by Artem Moroz, Brave1’s head of international investment. “The Russians don’t need to fundraise for drone production,” he noted, with bitter irony.
“We want to win the war with the help of technology because we can’t compete with man power,” he continued. “Most of the innovation comes from the private sector. We unite 1,500 companies, some in apartments, some operating at a huge scale, providing thousands of drones.”
Before the show-and-tell, I listened to Oleksiy Babenko, one of Ukraine’s best drone producers, make his pitch to foreign investors. Babenko’s company, Vyriy — named for a paradise in pre-Christian Slavic mythology — makes a small FPV drone called Molfar, which can function in swarms and evade Russian electronic jamming.
“Practically every Ukrainian university has a polytech [division] that graduates a lot of talent. We are a technical hub for software development, and young tech entrepreneurs are migrating to the battlefield,” he told the group.
A technician prepares a Shrike drone at the Skyfall military technology company in Ukraine.Andrew Kravchenko
“But this brilliant talent needs investment, domestic or foreign, to scale up production. If we don’t do this, we will die.”
After Babenko came the young entrepreneurs with slide decks and videos: Bravo Dynamics promotes a radio-based mesh network that can connect drones, but could also have civilian uses. Farsight Vision produces software that digests visual data, which could help drone targeting or serve business uses. VMP has a robot model “that will be the main tool for logistics on the front line,” but could be used for civil defense.
There is both pride and a sense of frustration in the room. Ukraine is a start-up nation. These talented innovators, not Ukrainian government bureaucrats, have sparked the drone revolution.
Right now, Ukraine produces 94% of its own drones and is reducing its dependence on Chinese parts. Kyiv is also manufacturing 40% of its other weapons inventory.
But Ukrainian factories are operating at only one-fourth of capacity, according to Kamyshin, the former government minister. “We need $10 billion to $15 billion of necessary capital to produce what is needed,” he told me as we fast-walked through a park near his office so he could work off some of the daily tension. “We are much better innovators than the Russians, but we need to scale up.”
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Private Ukrainian firms lead Europe and the U.S. in producing battle-tested drones, from mass-produced FPVs to highly secret deep strike missile drones. Ukraine seeks not only to intensively scale up its own drone production but to become an international hub for dual-use technology.
However, unlike Russia, which can draw on billions from its (dwindling) sovereign wealth fund, Ukrainians must raise funds to increase government and private drone production to keep up with Russian drone output — which has now expanded to industrial scale.
“Our only chance is to become our own arsenal and the arsenal for Europe,” argued former Ukrainian Defense Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk over coffee. “The question is, how to organize that.”
European governments are seriously addressing this question of scaling up Ukrainian production, and some private investors are hovering. The question is whether they can act quickly enough to fund joint projects inside Ukraine or based in Europe. Especially now that Trump has decreed Washington will no longer give military aid to Kyiv, but will let Europeans buy weapons to transfer.
There’s no time to waste, as Russia is scaling up its drone output at a frightening rate.
In this photo taken from a video distributed by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service in May, Russian servicemen train to operate military drones in an undisclosed location.Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP
Advantage Russia
Putin has rallied Russia’s entire state-run industrial machine behind the war effort, and the total drone output of its state-run industrial machine now exceeds Ukraine’s. Long-range drone production more than doubled from 2023 to 2025, and has increased fivefold since then.
Prodded by Ukraine’s success in drone technology, Moscow is rushing to build a drone empire, even introducing school curriculums about the development and operations of drones.
Moreover, while Russia receives support from its ever-tightening alliance with China, North Korea, and Iran, Trump is too transactional to see the broader geopolitical threat this drone quartet poses to the United States.
Tehran was the first to partner with Moscow by sending thousands of its long-range Shaheds to Russia in 2022. Since then, Shaheds have become the go-to UAV for terrorizing Ukrainian cities.
Iran also helped Russia set up its own production facilities in Tatarstan (now spread out over the whole country), which mass-produce the killer drones, along with decoy copies to confuse Ukrainian air defenses.
In this photo taken from a video distributed by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service in August, a soldier launches a reconnaissance drone in an undisclosed location in Ukraine.Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP
Equally dangerous, Russia is giving North Korea the technology and production skills to start producing the Russian variants of Iran’s Shaheds, according to Ukraine’s head of military intelligence, Kyrylo Budanov. This will enable the North to strike targets across South Korea, changing the balance of power between the two nations, Budanov warned in an interview with the military news site the War Zone.
Meantime, China, despite its denials, is actively enabling Russia’s drone production, providing basic drones and many critical components. “China uses Russia as a research base,” I was told by Yehor Cherniev, deputy chairman of the Ukrainian parliament’s National Security Committee. “China watches aspects of the new warfare. It is about geopolitical vision on both sides.”
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Without Beijing’s aid, Russia would probably be unable to rapidly scale up its production of long-range UAVs.
Moreover, top experts on Russia and China warn that the quartets’ mutual interest in undermining the West should shatter any Trump illusions of splitting Russia from China.
Trump’s coddling of Putin only speeds Russia’s advancement in the new global drone wars, which could boomerang against Washington all too soon.
“The U.S. will be drawn in,” insisted former defense minister Zagorodnyuk. “China and Russia want to destroy Western dominance, starting with Europe and NATO, and leading to a clash with the United States.
“This war is not going to end, but is going to get worse.”
Prime Minister of Denmark Mette Frederiksen lays a wreath during a memorial ceremony, as her husband Bo Tengberg and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, right, stand behind her at the Field of Mars at Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv, Ukraine, in 2024.Mads Claus Rasmussen
What Europe understands
On Aug. 3, as Denmark took over the rotating European Union presidency, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen called on Europeans to “change our mindset” about helping Kyiv.
“Instead of thinking we are delivering weapons to Ukraine,” she stated bluntly, “we have to think of it as a part of rearming ourselves — because right now it is the army of Ukraine that is protecting Europe. I see no signs that Putin’s imperial dreams stop with Ukraine.”
The tough-minded Frederiksen, who stood up to Trump when he threatened to seize Greenland, is now echoed by most other European leaders, none of whom harbor illusions about Putin’s aims. They understand that Ukraine’s army is defending the line between Western democracies and Eurasian adversaries, as Europe’s NATO members struggle to beef up their weak defenses.
Russia has been conducting assassinations, sabotage, and cyberwarfare against European nations for the past several years. The Kremlin clearly seeks to militarize and control the Arctic, which impacts the Nordic states, and to exert its power in the Baltic Sea and the North Atlantic.
The three Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania — along with other European nations that suffered under Soviet domination, all worry that Putin’s first move should Ukraine fall would be to move on them, perhaps using drones.
The aim would be to prove NATO was a paper tiger and would not come to its members’ defense, leading to the collapse of the alliance.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, left, shakes hands with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky during their briefing in Kyiv, Ukraine, on Friday.Efrem Lukatsky
Mark Rutte, the former Dutch prime minister and current secretary-general of NATO, has gone one step further, warning that “Russia is reconstituting itself at an incredible pace, and the U.S. is not secure if the Atlantic, Europe, and the Arctic are not secured.”
Rutte has also cautioned that if China’s Xi Jinping attacks Taiwan, the Chinese leader might ask Putin to open a new front in Europe to distract NATO and the United States.
With Trump favoring Putin, the Europeans are moving to bolster Kyiv’s military production, including drones. They know they need Ukraine’s army as a buffer against Moscow. As Zelensky said at the Munich Security Conference in Germany in February, referring to the Russians: “Right now, Ukraine stops them. If not, who will stop them?”
Good question.
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Europe is far from ready to defend against drones or other Russian mischief now that the United States has turned its back. “The Europeans are really changing. They are buying time for themselves,” said Zagarodnyuk. “They realize they will be next.”
With that in mind, Frederiksen has pioneered the “Danish model,” a framework whereby Europeans fund drone production by private Ukrainian manufacturers, with Copenhagen vetting the contracts and effectiveness.
Germany, Norway, the Netherlands, Britain, and the European Union are following suit, as is a special fund set up by NATO. Private European weapons manufacturers are looking into joint production and sending representatives to Ukraine to test drones and components. Ukraine, meanwhile, has offered its front line for companies to “Test in Ukraine.”
Ukrainian drone units near the front line tell me they often host European military or civilian manufacturers looking to test drones or components. Few Americans come, they said, and U.S. special forces no longer visit. If Europe coordinates its efforts, that may suffice to fund Ukraine’s drone scale-up and block Russia’s push to dominate drone warfare.
But that goal will be Herculean if Trump continues to back Putin over Europe and Ukraine.
President Donald Trump meets with Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office at the White House on Aug. 18 in Washington. (AP Photo/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)Julia Demaree Nikhinson
What Trump doesn’t understand
Last fall, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt sounded the alarm over America’s lack of readiness for the wars of the future.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, the two men warned: “Future wars will no longer be about who can mass the most people or field the best jets, ships and tanks. Instead, they will be dominated by increasingly autonomous weapons systems (largely drones) and powerful algorithms. Unfortunately, this is a future for which the United States remains unprepared.”
Five days after Ukraine’s Operation Spiderweb garnered huge international publicity, Trump signed an executive order calling for “continued American development, commercialization and export of drones.” He called for American “drone dominance.”
What the president did not do was turn to Ukraine, which has extensive combat experience with drones that the U.S. military and its nascent drone manufacturers lack.
To understand whether that makes sense, I turned to Michael Horowitz, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Perry World House, who served in the Biden administration as U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development and emerging capabilities. Translated, that means he is an expert on the new drone warfare, where large masses of relatively cheap unmanned drones can deliver precise and deadly strikes.
“The Ukraine war has been transformative to the U.S. military in a couple of ways,” he told me. “It showed how attack drones are now a ubiquitous part of warfare, and ready to scale up today.”
A Ukrainian serviceman operates a drone on the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region of Ukraine in 2024.Andriy Andriyenko
While the Pentagon has used thousands of drones against militants such as the Yemeni Houthis, the new warfare will demand millions, which “requires the U.S. to find a different model than the war on terrorism … drawing from the lessons from Ukraine,” Horowitz said.
There is another lesson at hand. The Pentagon is a slow-moving bureaucracy that normally deals with only a handful of defense contractors that take years to produce small numbers of very expensive ships, tanks, and planes — most (not all) of which are now vulnerable to cheap drones.
Moreover, the U.S. military structure generally emphasizes a rigid top-down command when it comes to weapons, which can make change difficult.
Ukraine, out of necessity, has cast aside this inflexible model, as small military units now do critical drone R&D and modify drones daily to adjust to changes in battlefield conditions. Moreover, private drone firms and their brilliant techies interact directly with the military and test on the battlefront.
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These are lessons yet to be absorbed by a Pentagon roiled by internal politics and reluctant to commit sufficient funds to scaling up small, inexpensive drones and robots that will be at the forefront of new wars.
Yet, lo and behold, a U.S. change agent has entered the picture.
Schmidt, the former Google CEO, has signed an agreement in Denmark with the Ukrainian government to produce hundreds of thousands of AI-enhanced drones this year, and more next year — particularly the desperately needed Shahed interceptors.
Schmidt’s secretive firm, Swift Beat, has already been supplying Ukraine with drones that have downed many Shaheds. Ukraine will have priority on the interceptors, which will be sold at cost.
This major project by a big name like Schmidt may give other U.S. drone firms — and even U.S. investment funds — the needed encouragement to take advantage of the talent and testing opportunities in Ukraine.
Unfortunately, Trump’s blindness to Putin’s motives will probably deter the U.S. military from making use of Ukrainian expertise in confronting Russia’s strategic army of drones. If he rejects cooperation with Ukraine and Europe — including giving a thumbs-down to any form of Zelensky’s proposed drone deal — it will help Russia surge ahead of the U.S. in drone dominance.
Should this course remain unchanged, sooner rather than later, Americans, Europeans, and Ukraine will pay a very high price.
Dozens of former students of the Paul Green School of Rock Music, most long out of touch, have reconnected to talk about their past. They had rock and roll childhoods most kids could only dream about. The epic road trips and European tours. The performances with rock stars like Eddie Vedder and Billy Idol.
But the alumni of the lauded former Philadelphia musical education program are not simply reminiscing about the music. They are coming to terms with the physical, psychological, and emotional abuse they say Paul Green subjected them to while they were children.
Their conversations revolve around a report Air Mail magazine published in May about Green, a former punk rocker who styled himself a brash tastemaker, and the school he founded in 1998. Based on interviews with more than 60 former students, the story described how Green often flew into violent rages, struck students, and fostered a sexually charged environment for his teenage students.
Although Green did not respond to the allegations in the Air Mail story at the time, he announced through a spokesperson soon after that he would not join his students on a summer tour in the U.S. and Europe.
Since, two dozen of Green’s former students and staff members have spoken with The Inquirer to share additional allegations of misconduct. They include a woman who said Green initiated frequent sexual contact that lasted nearly two years with her in 2007, when she was his 17-year-old student.
It is the first time Green, who was the vulgar and volatile subject of a 2005 documentary Rock School, has been publicly accused of having sex with a student enrolled at his school.
Green declined to be interviewed for this story. After The Inquirer emailed Green this week with a list of allegations it would be reporting, Green responded Thursday and denied having sexual relations with anyone underage or who had been a student at the time. He added that he will close his current children’s music academies, including one in Roxborough, and will retire from teaching.
Paul Green and his charges at the Paul Green School of Rock Music in 2005.
Green said in a statement Thursday, “I want to be very clear, however, that some of the more serious allegations being made, particularly those that are sexual in nature, are not accurate. I have never shown students pornography, and while I admit to extramarital relationships with women connected to School of Rock, I have never had a romantic or sexual relationship with anyone under legal age or anyone who was a current student, during that time frame, or ever. I also deny any sexual harassment.”
The age of consent in Pennsylvania is 16, but sexual contact by a person in a recognized position of trust or authority — such as a teacher or school administrator — with someone under 18 is considered a third-degree felony punishable by up to seven years in prison. This was the law in 2007, and it remains the same today.
The woman, who The Inquirer agreed not to name because of the nature of the claims, said Green first began flirting with her when she was 15, with “inappropriate jokes or comments about my appearance.”
As she got older, it escalated.
“Then, winking, touching, hugging,” the woman said. “He would put his hand on my leg and see how high he could go before I stopped him.”
She was a member of the All Stars, the most talented musicians who toured as a band and performed at professional venues and festivals. She said that during her junior year in high school, when she was 17, Green invited her to meet him for sex at a hotel near the former Race Street school, asking if she was going to “chicken out” before texting her his room number.
The ongoing sexual contact that began that day lasted for almost two years, only ending after the woman graduated and moved away, she said.
During their time together, the woman said, Green sometimes provided her with marijuana, Champagne, or cocaine. He rented porn for them to watch and attempted to arrange a threesome with a former student working at the school, she said.
He would joke, “You’re my teenage mistress,” she said.
Two of Green’s former students and two formerstaffers told The Inquirer they had known that Green was engaged in sexual conduct with the woman while she was his student and after graduation. Two of them said Green himself had told them at the time about the sexual contact — both of whom asked not to be named for fear that it could affect their current employment. One former staffer said Green and the student had been intimate on a European tour bus, under a blanket, while chaperones sat rows ahead.
That staffer said they were afraid at the time to speak out against Green, who ruled the school he created like a self-proclaimed “Überlord.” But staying silent is a regret they’ve carried for nearly two decades.
“I didn’t protect her at all,” the former staffer lamented.
‘Total manipulation’
Many of the 60-plus students who described Green’s physical, verbal, and inappropriate behavior to Air Mail, a weekly news and culture newsletter launched in 2019 by alums of the New York Times and Vanity Fair, are now connected in a WhatsApp group. After an Inquirer reporter contacted the former students, they responded with an open letter to explain why they had decided to continue speaking out.
“We entered his programs with trust and hope, but too many of us left with wounds and trauma we’re still working to heal. Some of us have never played music again.”
And despite bonds of life-forming musical experiences, many of them told The Inquirer they went their separate ways after graduation, hoping to forget the pain.
Former Paul Green School of Rock students Emilia Richman (left) and Carolyn Satlow at Dickinson Square Park on July 7.
“It was total manipulation,” said Carolyn Satlow, 37, an All Star who attended the Downingtown branch of the Paul Green School of Rock Music from 2004 to 2006, and is now chief of staff of the Vetri restaurant group. “This web of secrets that kept us all silent.”
Satlow had turned 18 and graduated from rock school when Green began a monthslong sexual relationship with her in 2007. At the time, she was working at the school as an administrator.
Now married with two children, Satlow said Green also told her about his sexual contact with the then-teenage student.
“I thought this adult person was the authority in the room,” she said of Green. “We all trusted him. I was an insecure teenager and Paul knew that and preyed on it.”
Satlow says being able to talk about what happened, and reconnect with other students who went through similar experiences, has been healing.
“We found lives for ourselves, and we’ve become successful in music and outside of music, and just being great human beings,” Satlow said. “Because we’re all just actively trying not to be him.”
‘Paul being Paul’
By constantly discussing his own sex life and the sex lives of students, who were mostly 12 to 18 years old, Green created an environment where even his most outrageous behavior could be normalized, former students and staffers said.
Jen Bowles, an administrator at the school from 2005 to 2007, told The Inquirer that Green had sent her texts asking if she would have sex with him if he booked a fancy hotel, like the Rittenhouse Hotel or the Sofitel Philadelphia at Rittenhouse Square.
Serious about her job at the school, which she initially saw as an empowering, punk rock space for young musicians to express themselves, Bowles, who was then 24, said she had tried to ignore Green’s messages as inappropriate jokes.
Former Paul Green School of Rock students Allie Hauptman and Aaron Sheehan at Rowhouse Grocery in Philadelphia on June 30.
Bowles, who now lives in Vancouver after earning a doctorate in public health from Drexel University, recalls attending a postshow work dinner Green arranged in 2007 at the former Abbaye bar and restaurant in Northern Liberties. Bowles had hoped the dinner would be an opportunity to discuss a potential promotion to manage the Philly school.
After they had just ordered dinner, she said, Green asked her to have sex with him.
“‘It’s finally happening,’” she recalls Green saying, adding that he assumed that they would have sex.
When she rejected his proposition, she said, Green berated her over dinner, referring to her as a “tease,” shouting that he would find a way to fire her. During his tirade, Bowles said, Green told her that her rejection didn’t matter. He had other options for sex, including students, staff, and sex workers, she recalls him saying.
Bowles said Green then bragged about his sexual conduct with former students and staff he had taught since childhood.
“I wait till they’re 18,” Bowles recalls him saying.
Bowles said she did not report back to work the following Monday and resigned within a week.
“I was broken at this point,” Bowles said. “I thought my future was crumbling into a million pieces, and I learned that the young people I cared about were in the hands of a horrible person.”
Bowles’ longtime friend, Ruth Scullion, recalls Bowles telling her about the experience with Green shortly after it happened in 2007.
“She had told me about the culture at the school — and that she felt preyed on,” Scullion. “She told me about going out to dinner with Paul for what she thought was a work dinner, and how he started being overtly sexual with her and propositioning her. She said when she refused, he said, ‘Well, you’re too old for me anyway.’ It still gives me chills thinking about it.”
Julia Rainer, 37, a former All Star guitarist who now lives in South Philly and works as a therapist, also recalled Bowles detailing the incident to her at the time.
Paul Green School of Rock Music emails shared with The Inquirer show that two months later, Green strategized with a staffer on how best to attack Bowles’ credibility if she filed a sexual harassment lawsuit. By then, the circumstances surrounding the popular employee’s departure had started to spread among staff, even as Bowles decided against pursuing legal action.
Green wrote to the staffer in 2007 about the alleged advances, saying of himself, “Once again: Paul being Paul.” Then later adding, “Here is EXACTLY what I need from you: keep your ears way to the ground, do what damage control you can do.”
‘Always part of rock school’
For many former students, the nearly two years since the Air Mail reporter’s initial contacts have included painful revelations to family members, therapists, and each other.
Last year, people who had long avoided reckoning with their past at the Paul Green School of Rock Music began to reconnect on Zoom.
A.Z. Madonna, 32, a former All Star, who originally grew up in Maplewood, N.J., and now writes about classical music for the Boston Globe, said for years she had distanced herself from her rock school friends.
“I didn’t want to be reminded of how Paul made me feel, which was that I was a failure who deserved to fail,” she said to The Inquirer.
But Madonna is now part of the private WhatsApp group chat, where for months the 60 former students shared stories about their experience at the Paul Green School of Rock Music. Some still talk daily, offering messages of support to friends picking up their instruments again.
There have been park meetups and coffee shop get-togethers. In May, a bunch of the former students attended a Metallica and Limp Bizkit concert, the latter a band they say Green would have berated them for listening to as kids, always emphasizing the classics.
“It’s been very healing,” said Emilia Richman, 33, a South Philly musician and former All Star who now works as a mental health administrator. “So many of us had stayed away from each other because of our shame.”
While some former students said Green’s school unlocked opportunities, they also said that he taught them through fear and humiliation.
Allie Hauptman, 38, who attended the Philly school from 1998 to 2005, and is a founding partner of Rowhouse Grocery, a boutique corner store in South Philly, said she would often turn down the volume on her keyboard all the way so that Green wouldn’t be able to hear any possible mistakes so she was “in the clear from the yelling and swearing.”
Rainer recently played her first show after returning to music in the months after the Air Mail story published.
“The culture of humiliating you, bullying you, isolating you — that was always part of rock school,” she said.
So was Green’s controlling behavior, the students said.
“He really became addicted to that power and control he had over all of us,” said Gina Randazzo, 40, of Collingswood, who began guitar lessons with Green in 1999, was an All Star, and eventually worked at Studio House, a now-closed recording studio for students and young people in suburban New York that Green opened in 2010. “It was almost like he couldn’t help himself.”
The former students say they are not after revenge.
“This is about ensuring that no child is ever again put in a position where they are vulnerable to this kind of manipulation, control, and abuse,” they said in their letter. “While he has released a statement closing PGRA and retiring from teaching ‘in this capacity,’ our primary concern is that PG is never again placed in a position of power over children.”
In their open letter against Green, the 60 former students spoke directly to his most-recent students.
“We hope you are safe,” they said.
That’s something Aaron Sheehan, 33, an All Star from 2007 to 2009 and member of Studio House, tried to tell the students himself when he chanced upon Green’s new pupils jamming to Yes at a South Philly street festival three years ago.
Walking toward the music, he decided to confront Green for telling him he was no good until he finally believed it.
But Green hadn’t come. Sheehan tried telling the parents, but they brushed him away. He must’ve had a bad experience, they told him. They love Paul.
It was hard watching the kids play.
“It was like looking at us all over again,” he said.
‘I was an overgrown teenager’
In 2009, Green sold the company he had formed out of his living room to an investment fund in a deal worth $10 million. In 2023, the School of Rock, which now includes 500 schools worldwide, was purchased by Youth Enrichment Brands, a leading youth activities platform.
Stacey Ryan, the current School of Rock president, stressed that the institution has had no affiliation with Green for over 15 years.
“Student safety is our highest priority, and our mission has always been to provide an empowering space where young people can grow — not just as musicians, but as individuals,” she said.
As part of the 2009 deal, Green retained leadership of the All Stars program, but left within a year after a final meltdown with students, when Green allegedly mocked a student’s Catholic faith, threw a metal chair, and referred to Mother Teresa with a vulgar term for a woman’s vagina, said Sam Mercurio, a South Philly musician and former All Star from 2007 to 2010.
“By the end, he had made it all feel so normal,” said Mercurio, who told The Inquirer Green once whipped him with a mic cable during a rehearsal.
After living in Woodstock, N.Y., for a time, Green returned to Philadelphia in 2017, opening up a new venture, the Roxborough-based Paul Green Rock Academy. The academy, which also has locations in Connecticut and the Bay Area, offered students the same chances to tour and jam with musicians, like the former Zappa band members, that the original rock school kids did 20 years ago.
Shortly after the Air Mail article, the academy’s social media went dormant. Scott Thunes, the academy’s longtime assistant musical director and former Frank Zappa bassist, would be in charge of tours and the entire program, according to a spokesperson at the time. Green said that the school would be renamed the Thunes Institute for Musical Excellence.
In late June, the North Philly performance space PhilaMOCA canceled the students’ scheduled performance of “We Love Zappa.” A spokesperson for the venue said that Green’s continued involvement with the school, along with a push from a former student, led them to shut the show down. Thunes said the cancellation only hurt the students.
Despite his statement, when reached by The Inquirer on Monday, Green was with the Thunes Institute students on an August European tour, alongside Gibby Haynes, the lead singer of the Butthole Surfers and a longtime collaborator with Green’s schools. Videos show him in the front row.
In a statement to The Inquirer, Green said he was stepping in for Thunes, who had to leave citing a “personal issue” halfway through the tour. “The students worked so hard and had already experienced so much turbulence heading into the tour, so we weighed the backlash of me attending versus the fallout of canceling,” Green said. “The current parents unanimously requested that I return to ensure a smooth transition until we could implement a suitable replacement.”
Green, who graduated from Temple University Beasley School of Law in 2021, said he did not speak out sooner about the Air Mail allegations because, “I have been reflecting on that time period, gathering my thoughts, and trying to find the right words. I have been balancing how to genuinely apologize and take accountability for my actions from over 15 years ago, while also unambiguously denying the allegations of things that never occurred.”
Long open about his battle with addiction, he had his own dysfunctional childhood — he grew up fatherless in Port Richmond, joined the Philly punk scene by 13, lived on his own by 15, and formed the original school when his music career failed. Green said drug rehab and years of therapy and meditation have helped him grow.
“I started School of Rock in my living room because I love teaching music, and I wanted to create a fun and intensive atmosphere for students,” he said in his statement to The Inquirer. “I had no idea that it would be successful, and I was not at all prepared for that success at such a young age. I was an overgrown teenager when those students needed a responsible adult. That said, despite how it may appear, my inappropriate behavior or language never came from a place of predatory intent as has been insinuated.”
He added that closing the schools “was not an easy decision, as teaching music has been my life’s work and greatest passion. But I believe this is the right moment to close this chapter with gratitude and integrity.”
‘Nobody does what Paul Green does’
Ten parents, who contacted The Inquirer through a spokesperson for the Paul Green Rock Academy, said they never witnessed Green cross a line. None of the children ever told them he did, they said.
“I have seen countless rehearsals and performances in the last seven years,” said one parent, whose child is a longtime student at the academy. “I’ve never witnessed any of those alleged behaviors, nor has my child ever reported inappropriate conduct.”
When speaking to The Inquirer, the parents, whose children are current or former students of the Paul Green Rock Academy, were only responding to the questions about the allegations already published by Air Mail. The Inquirer did not make them aware of the new sexual allegations detailed in this story.
Though Green, in his statement, says he’s changed, parents of current students at the Rock Academy tell The Inquirer that Green didn’t run from his bad boy image.
While assuring them he’s mellowed, he still makes it part of his selling point — and a new generation of parents believe him.
“Paul’s teaching style was addressed right from the very beginning,” said one parent, whose daughter graduated from the academy, in a statement provided to The Inquirer through a school spokesperson after a reporter had contacted the academy about Green. “In my mind there was no question that we all knew what we were signing up for.”
One parent said Green recommended that families considering the Paul Green Rock Academy watch Rock School, which shows him berating and humiliating students busy mastering some of the most complicated rock compositions ever written. In the film, Green also presents a student who described being suicidal with an award for “most likely to kill himself.”
Green can still be “arrogant,” “rude,” and “foulmouthed,” the parents said. He sometimes still screams and storms out of rehearsals, they said. One parent said she had met with Green for throwing a rattle shaker at her child, but that they had moved past it.
The parent, who stressed she did not want to dismiss the former students’ experiences, credits Green’s “grittier” and “edgier” approach for helping her son, who is neurodiverse, flourish socially and musically.
His current students appear heavily devoted. On Instagram, they praise classic rock and quote Zappa. They take each other to prom and form bands. They post tour updates and photos from past performances, where Green could often be seen in the front row.
Green addressed the allegations months ago, they said, removed himself from rehearsals, and met with parents individually.
“Paul’s a pretty open guy — and I was aware that there was stuff in the past he wasn’t proud of,” said one parent, whose two sons are Rock Academy grads. “But I can certainly say this: Nobody does what Paul Green does. No rock school does what the Paul Green Rock Academy does. Nobody offers that experience.”
‘Like Whiplash’
But some of the most successful musicians to emerge from the Paul Green School of Rock Music say nothing was worth the verbal and emotional abuse they experienced from Green.
Eric Slick, 38, a former All Star and now drummer of the Philly-formed rock band Dr. Dog, was also featured in the Air Mail story. A drumming prodigy who grew up in Fairmount — his grandfather was a jazz trombonist who played with Billie Holiday — he had been bullied for his weight at the Masterman School before hoping he found a sanctuary at rock school in 1998.
His talent only made him more of a target with Green. Like on his 12th birthday, when Green suddenly exploded in rage over his Pink Floyd drum solo, spitting, cursing, throwing mics, and kicking amplifiers.
Eric Slick, drummer for the rock band Dr. Dog, says he was bullied by the Paul Green School of Rock Music founder.
“It’s this Whiplash moment where I was like, ‘Oh, I’m not safe here,’” said Slick, who now lives in Nashville, referring to the 2014 film about a young jazz drummer and his explosive teacher.
At his birthday dinner with his parents at Spaghetti Warehouse after practice, Slick said nothing.
“We were these misfit toys who didn’t fit in, who weren’t jocks, who weren’t popular. And then suddenly we have this opportunity to jam and grow as musicians together,” he said. Talking, he thought as a kid, would jeopardize that.
“I would be out of this friend group, and I would be done,” Slick said.
It’s a sentiment shared by many former students.
“I feel like I really shut down,” said Lauren Cohen, 37, of Doylestown, an All Star from 2002 to 2005, and a classical musician who performs regularly in Philadelphia. “I feel like I shoved my emotions down and everything that was telling me, “This isn’t safe.” I kept ignoring it because I made friends.”
The bullying from Green grew constant, according to Slick. About his weight, his appearance, his high school sex life.
“I remember stuffing down all of these extreme sad feelings I was having after the rehearsals,” he said. “You just realized that every facet of your life is manipulated in order for him to get what he wants, which is to sell schools.”
He’s shared stories of the school with his current bandmates. “That’s not normal,” they tell him.
Even now, while playing to tens of thousands, Slick finds himself looking stage left, where Green stood so long judging his every drum groove and fill, set to erupt.
“The fear of his wrath still haunts me,” Slick said.
Kaleen Reading, a drummer with the band Mannequin Pussy, performing at the World Cafe Live in 2024.
Kaleen Reading, 33, an All Star from 2006 to 2009 and drummer for the Philly-based punk band Mannequin Pussy, said Green also often denigrated her about her weight, and left her fearful of pushing the tempo during performances to this day.
In May, shortly after the Air Mail article was published, Reading announced she would not travel with her group on a series of European summer tour dates. At the time, Reading wrote on Instagram that her absence was due to “mental health concerns” — and that the move was necessary for the “longevity of me remaining in the music industry.”
Reading later told The Inquirer she needed the time to process her own memories of the Paul Green School of Rock Music, including verbal abuse.
“Paul Green is not a teacher,” she said. “He is an abuser who can get results from yelling at already talented kids he selected to advertise his school.”
‘Just a child’
Sitting in a car outside her home before work on a gray morning in July,the former student who said Green began ongoing sexual contact with her when she was 17 said she saw Green as more than a teacher. At the time, Green represented the only real adult male figure in her life. Familiar with her battles with depression, anxiety, and an eating disorder, Green encouraged her dreams of becoming a professional guitarist, she said.
“I would have done anything for his approval,” the woman said.
At 17, she and Green would meet at a hotel blocks from the former Race Street school. Or Green would pick her up a short distance away, so no one would see, and drive to a roadside, budget motel with pirate and Hawaiian-themed rooms called the Feather Nest Inn just over the Ben Franklin Bridge. On tour, Green would sometimes sneak her into his room, she said.
The woman tried burying the memories of her experience with Green, but struggled with ongoing depression and feelings of inadequacy. She said she suffered a nervous breakdown “for weeks” last year, after she was first contacted by the Air Mail reporter. Although not ready to speak publicly at the time, the query forced a reckoning.
“If I hadn’t been forced to confront it, I was prepared to bury it forever,” she said.
Instead, with the help of a therapist, the woman began to grapple with what she said Green had put her through when she was underage.
“I let it all out,” said the woman.
She, too, has found strength in her old friends from rock school, whose friendship she packed away with the trauma. For years, she said could not enjoy the experience of music without memories of Green. She’s just now playing again.
“I always thought it was my fault,” she continued. “Still, I have to remind myself that I was just a child.”
LOS ANGELES — Inside a North Hollywood police precinct late on March 9, 1977, before the cops began questioning her about her father, Carol Steindler noticed a young woman sitting outside an office. The word HOMICIDE was stripped across the room’s pebbled-glass door, but Steindler didn’t think anything of it, didn’t see the straight line linking those three things: the word and the woman and her father. How could she see it? She didn’t know yet that he was dead.
What she did know was that Howie Steindler, 72, the owner of the Main Street Gym and a respected boxing manager, had not come home that night. Her mother, Ann, had telephoned her in a panic. Your daddy still isn’t here. Howie often stopped at his favorite bar, the Redwood, after a long day of work, but something this time made Ann “insanely upset,” Carol said recently, “more upset than usual.” Ann was so unsettled that she also called boxing promoter Don Fraser, Howie’s best friend. Fraser in turn called the police, who told him to get himself and at least one member of the Steindler family to the precinct.
The nature and timing of Howie’s disappearance were strange. Over the previous month, Ann, who tended toward the eccentric, had become convinced that something terrible was going to happen to her husband, telling Carol and others, My Howie’s gonna die. My Howie’s gonna die. Carol had stopped by her parents’ condominium in Encino, Calif., one day in February to find Howie, who had always handled the couple’s finances, teaching Ann how to write checks. “Are you sick?” Carol asked him, fearing that her father might be suffering from a fatal disease. No, he replied. It was just time for Ann to learn.
Those puzzling incidents were piling up while Steindler was approaching what promised to be the apex of his career in boxing. Looming over LA’s skid row neighborhood, the Main Street Gym was an institution, and Steindler was a popular member of the sport’s community, 5-foot-6 and slim but tough, hot-tempered yet softhearted, with few apparent enemies if any at all. He was so well regarded, in fact, that when the cast and crew of a low-budget movie — about an underdog Philadelphia fighter who gets an improbable shot at the heavyweight title — decided to use the gym as a location to shoot several scenes, one of the film’s stars had sought him out.
For two weeks in 1975, Burgess Meredith had shadowed Steindler, observing how he spoke to fighters and ran the gym, soliciting insights and advice from him, so he could better portray Mickey Goldmill, the wise and grouchy trainer who prepares Rocky Balboa to go the distance against Apollo Creed in Rocky. The Academy Awards would be held on March 28, 1977, and among the film’s 10 nominations was Meredith’s, for best actor in a supporting role. If he won, the chances were good that Meredith, in front of millions of viewers on ABC, would thank Steindler in his acceptance speech.
That moment of worldwide recognition for Steindler would never materialize, and not merely because Jason Robards, for playing Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee in All the President’s Men, won the best supporting actor Oscar that year and Meredith did not. Instead, Howie Steindler’s name would be left, for those who remember it, cloaked in sadness and mystery. Fraser picked up Carol and drove to the police station. The two of them sat together, waiting for an answer about his whereabouts, as the clock ticked toward midnight.
Sylvester Stallone on location while filming the original “Rocky” in Philadelphia.
A troubled heart of gold
Sylvester Stallone was anonymous in Hollywood, with just $106 to his name, before writing the script for Rocky and insisting, at the risk of scuttling the entire project, that he play the titular character. Rocky’s true star, the biggest name in the movie at the time, was Meredith.
He had earned an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor the previous year for his performance as a salesman/ex-vaudevillian in The Day of the Locust, and his lengthy career as a stage and screen actor, coupled with his deserved reputation as a ladies’ man, had made him a frequent source of copy in newspaper entertainment sections and gossip pages. (“Showgirl is 4th Wife of Burgess Meredith” was the headline of a brief United Press International story in January 1951.)
He was one of 41 actors who either auditioned or was considered for the role of Mickey; Lee J. Cobb, Art Carney, and George Burns were among the others. When producer Bob Chartoff approached him about the part, though, Meredith was skeptical.
“Chartoff came to Dad’s house,” Meredith’s son Jonathan said. “‘Look, we’re making a film about a boxer with Sylvester Stallone, and we’d like you to be in it. We think it’s really going to be a great film, so what we’d like to do is give you a piece of the production and then pay you less.’ And Dad says, ‘Well, I don’t know. I’d rather have the money because no one’s gonna watch a film about a boxer.’ And then, of course, it became a hit.”
Meredith accepted the role for a salary of $20,000, and the Main Street Gym was an obvious choice for Stallone, Chartoff, coproducer Irwin Winkler, and director John Avildsen as an essential location for Rocky, its grimy interior and creaky floors lending Stallone’s training scenes with Meredith an atmosphere fit for any Philly neighborhood.
The gym, on the second floor of an old concrete theater, hovered above a parking garage at the intersection of Third and Main Streets. Its entrance adorned with a sign that read “World Rated Boxers Train Here Daily,” it shared the building with a luggage store. Jim Murray, the renowned Los Angeles Times sports columnist, described the gym’s setting as “losers’ turf, the crossroads of hopelessness and despair, the home base of a lot of guys who have quit in their corners of life.”
It was the perfect place for the hardest men on earth to harden themselves. Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali (when his name was Cassius Clay), Jack Dempsey, Floyd Patterson, Joe Louis, George Foreman: All of them and more trained there. Steindler himself managed Danny Lopez to the World Boxing Council featherweight championship in November 1976 — the same month that Rocky premiered. Lopez’s title fight was held in Ghana, and Steindler, sick at the time, couldn’t accompany him on the trip.
Still, he was so proud of his contribution to Lopez’s championship that he invited several friends and reporters to the Redwood one night, then had them listen to a recording of the radio broadcast of the bout. He’d sip a bottle of brandy immediately after Lopez’s fights to calm his nerves, and having taken over the gym in 1960, he kept a ledger, on a yellow notepad, of all the money he had loaned to fighters — two dollars here, three dollars there, 10 dollars sometimes — and never collected.
“Even with the gruff exterior,” Carol said recently, “he had a heart of gold.”
Jimmy Gambina, who played Mike, Mickey’s assistant, and whose father, Ralph, was an accomplished manager, spent weeks teaching, or trying to teach, Stallone proper boxing technique for the film. “I got him in condition to be a tough guy,” Gambina said, “not a good boxer, just a banger, a Joe Frazier type who weighed less.” Steindler served a different function, simply by being himself. He was Meredith’s model.
Jimmy Gambina, who played Mike, Mickey’s assistant in “Rocky.”
The first time he met Steindler, at the gym, Meredith was dressed in what he called his “broken-down outfit” to play Mickey: ratty sweatshirt, pilled cardigan, cotton balls stuffed in his cheeks, makeup cauliflowering his ears, 17 fake stitches zigzagging near his eyes. He asked Steindler if he could use the phone. The costume fooled Steindler, who told him, You think I’m running a hotel here? There’s a phone down on the street. I got other things to do.
“He thought I was one of the bums, and he gave it to me,” Meredith once told the Los Angeles Times. “Later, when I went out, one of the rather slow-minded pugs around there must’ve got to his ear and said, ‘That’s one of the stars of this thing.’”
Meredith wasn’t much of a boxing fan. Loving the sport required a “love of the brutal,” he once said, that he didn’t possess. But Steindler “gave me the mind of the man,” meaning Mickey. “I’d stay around that office and listen to him crack. He’s quite a fella.”
Rudy Tellez, who apprenticed under Steindler before becoming a longtime trainer and manager himself, said that Meredith and Steindler would sit down for long conversations, and Meredith would watch Steindler’s facial expressions intently: “That’s where he picked up all that dialogue and persona.”
There’s no public record of Steindler ever saying, Women weaken legs or You’re gonna eat lightning, and you’re gonna crap thunder, as Mickey did. But it wouldn’t have been out of character if he had. “He used to call me ‘schmuck’ or ‘putz’ or all other kinds of crazy Jewish names,” Tellez said. “He meant it with love, though.” He kept a wad of cash, as much as $400, on him at all times because he didn’t trust banks. He wore a special 14-karat-gold diamond ring and drove a gold ’76 Cadillac. His office was barely big enough to store a couple of brooms, and he decorated it with photos of chimpanzees with people’s names under them. He refused to list the gym’s phone number because he didn’t want to be bothered with “too many annoying calls.”
Homeless men, their bottles of wine and beer wrapped in paper bags, sometimes slipped inside the foyer and staggered up the staircase, following the aromas of fresh sweat, dried blood, and liniment. On those occasions, Steindler might grab the billy club that hung on one of the walls.
“I run this place, y’see,” he told an LA writer in February 1976; by then, his health deteriorating, he was carrying an oxygen tank with him. “I pay the rent, and this is the most famous gym in the world. Y’might hear remarks that this is a dingy neighborhood, but no gym in the world has a tenth the traffic or a hundredth of the number of fighters.
“Sure, we got troubles sometimes, but it’s nothing. Everybody’s being hit by the same trouble. We got characters floating around — the screwballs find their way up here — but I run a strict place. This is one establishment that stays the way it was established.”
Some of those characters were more dangerous, and some of the potential troubles more serious, than Steindler implied. Crime boss Mickey Cohen, who as a teen had trained at Main Street and fancied himself a budding featherweight contender, was a presence in the LA boxing scene until his death, from complications from stomach cancer surgery, in July 1976. Fraser tried to keep Cohen and the rest of his kind at a distance, according to his daughter Denise.
“Dad would say, ‘Don’t ever have the mob do anything for you because you’ll owe them for the rest of your life,’” she said. But boxing has always been seamy, stained with corruption. There’s no cleaning it. There never has been. All you do is live with it, if you can.
“Ex-gangsters, Mafia, I met a few,” Tellez said. “They’d come up and see Howie.”
Howie Steindler (right), who was Burgess Meredith’s model for the character Mickey in the movie “Rocky,” had a close friendship with promoter Don Fraser.
A critical error
The day of Steindler’s death began in its ordinary way: the click of a key into a lock, the clomping of feet up steps. Tellez had been worried about Steindler for a while, had heard him arguing on the phone frequently. The previous afternoon, in fact, Steindler had called a state senator to talk about problems he was having with the state athletic commission. He had another loud, anxious phone conversation that morning; with whom, Tellez didn’t know. When Steindler hung up the phone, Tellez asked him, Are you OK?
Yeah, schmuck, he mumbled. I’m all right.
Tellez wouldn’t let Steindler lock up the gym alone. They left together that night. He never saw his mentor again.
At the precinct, Carol thought perhaps her father had gotten into an argument or fight with another motorist, a road-rage-style incident, or maybe he had been arrested on DUI charges. The word murder didn’t cross her mind until the police separated her and Fraser and brought her into an office to question her.
“When I got in the room there,” she said, “you would have thought I killed my father. They treated you like that. ‘What time do you get home? What time did your husband get home? Where were you?’ And yet, they haven’t told me anything about my father. Finally, I said to the guy, ‘You’d better’ — and I used some not-so-nice words — ‘tell me what’s going on or I’m not telling you another thing.’”
So they told her: A highway patrol officer had come across Howie’s Cadillac on the shoulder of Ventura Freeway, five miles from the Steindlers’ house. His body was in the backseat, his feet dangling out an open door. He had sustained a horrible beating. Three of his ribs and a vertebra were broken. He had bruises on his head, chest, and right leg and a puncture wound to his right temple. Fraser identified the body to spare Carol the sight. The official cause of death was “suffocation by apparent smothering”; the police speculated that the killers had pushed Steindler’s face into the car-seat cushion.
His wallet, his keys, his identification papers, and his gold diamond ring were missing. There was a dent on the back of Steindler’s car and a hole slicing through the bumper, indications that someone had rear-ended him.
A witness had told police that two men had attacked Steindler as he stood near his Cadillac a block from his home, punching him before shoving him in the back of the car and driving away. At first, the observer had thought the victim was female, because Steindler was so small and slight. The witness drove past the scene once, then again, then left when one of the assailants started to approach her, but she described the men’s car as being older and gray.
The young woman. Carol now understood why the young woman had been sitting near the HOMICIDE door. She was the witness. And she had made one critical mistake: Instead of noticing the license plate of the old, gray car, she remembered the license plate of Steindler’s: HOWIE-5.
Carol Steindler, with former lightweight champion Sean O’Grady, has maintained a close connection to the National Boxing Hall of Fame, which gives out an award in her father’s honor.
‘You never know’
From that beginning, a lack of evidence — and competing theories of the crime — made the case difficult to solve. Marv Engquist, the detective who led the investigation, believed that Steindler had been a random victim, that the killers had collided with his Cadillac to draw him into a confrontation and rob him. The MO fit other unsolved murders in the same vicinity and time frame, and Steindler’s feistiness, his refusal to back down from anyone, could have escalated a robbery into something more deadly.
Carol has long been skeptical of that theory. “The police, the homicide detectives, all thought it was a bump-and-run,” she said, “and I kept saying, ‘No, it’s something else. My father and mother were acting really strange for two weeks.’ I don’t think it’s just a bump-and-run. I think they knew something.”
Gambina and Tellez still believe that the mob was responsible for Steindler’s murder. They raised and discussed that possibility in hushed tones and with measured words. “The fight game,” Gambina said. “You never know what’s going to happen with people.”
Carol took over the Main Street Gym and ran it until 1984, when it was razed to build a parking lot. She and her sister, Bobbi Beatty, would from time to time speak to a newspaper or TV reporter, usually on the anniversary of their father’s death, to reawaken interest in and awareness of the case. But the odds that it will be solved are less than slim. Detectives compiled suspects but never made an arrest. Carol, who lives in Thousand Oaks, Calif., is 86. Bobbi died of cancer in 2004. Those who were involved or might know what happened — even the killers themselves — have either died or aged into inertia.
“Unfortunately,” William Beatty, Bobbi’s widower, said in a phone interview, “it’s like you’re trying to find out if there are any witnesses to the Civil War.”
After 48 years, with so many questions still lingering unanswered and unanswerable, one detail remains especially haunting. Nine months after her husband’s car and body were discovered, Ann Steindler received a strange package in the mail: Howie’s wallet, Howie’s keys, Howie’s credit cards. No cash, no return address, no fingerprints.
True Rice, a Los Angeles transplant from Baltimore, walks by a site where “Rocky” was filmed, coincidentally wearing an appropriate hoodie.
What has changed and what hasn’t
Three hundred parking spots, give or take, cover the piece of land where the Main Street Gym once stood. In some ways, little has changed about the neighborhood. Weeds and tufts of grass burst up from the concrete. Walls and telephone poles are psychedelic with graffiti.
On a recent morning, a man in a red plaid shirt stretched out on a ledge near a palm bush and slept. A few feet away, another man, dressed in ratty black, crouched down, put his hands on the sides of his head, and began screaming. A pair of white sneakers dangled from a wire stretched above, giving the lot a Philadelphian flavor. Around the corner, a dog had dropped something in the middle of the sidewalk that its owner, if the animal even had an owner, hadn’t bothered to scoop up.
There was no historical marker commemorating the gym. No artwork invoking Rocky, Stallone, or Meredith. No acknowledgment of one of the most inspirational films ever made … or the dark story connected to it.
Then, as if by magic, there was something. There was someone. True Rice strolled through the lot, heading back to his apartment after grocery shopping. Twenty-nine and a native of West Baltimore, he moved to Los Angeles in 2020 to try to make it in modeling and music.
“Came out here with 60 dollars in my pocket,” he said, “looking for a change.”
The striking aspect about him wasn’t what he did but what he wore: a white, hooded sweatshirt that he had bought the day before. Plastered across the back were the words “ROCKY: His whole life was a million-to-one shot” and a depiction of Stallone atop the Art Museum steps.
Did Rice have any idea about the history of where was walking and what that history represented? The lot … the gym … the men … the movie … the murder … the stories and the scenes, exhilarating and evil.
He said what anyone would have expected him to say. He said what even those few who remember Howie Steindler and his death would have to admit. He stood in the middle of a grim city block with no memory, and he said he didn’t know.
The city’s new Neighborhood Wellness Court initiative has been placed on hold amid growing concern from the leadership of Philadelphia‘s courts and judges’ mounting frustration with the city officials tasked with overseeing the program.
Wellness court, which Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration launched in January as a fast-track way to arrest people in Kensington for drug-related offenses and get them into treatment, has not taken any new cases over the last three weeks, city officials said.
Supervising Municipal Court Judge Karen Simmons was nearly ready to shut the program down over frustration with the lack of coordination and communication from the Parker administration with the courts and other city agencies involved, according to sources with knowledge of conversations about the program.
Simmons was concerned that the city was treating people arrested in some neighborhoods differently from others, and that there was inconsistency in how the program was tracking its data and determining who should be eligible for treatment, according to the sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Simmons ultimately gave the city time to fix those issues, asking that officials put together a written manual and streamline the paperwork and intake procedures to ensure fairness, the sources said. The city is expected to make those adjustments so police can resume making arrests and bringing people through the program next week.
A spokesperson for the courts declined to comment and referred questions to the city.
Chief Public Safety Director Adam Geer oversees the office that runs Neighborhood Wellness Court in Kensington.
Chief Public Safety Director Adam Geer, who oversees the city office that runs wellness court, said the delays were related to “administrative protocols” that needed to be resolved but declined to provide specifics.
Geer said that he expects the program to return to normal operations next week and that the city “is fully committed to successfully implementing and sustaining the Neighborhood Wellness Court model.”
Joshu Harris, the city’s deputy director of public safety, is no longer overseeing the program‘s operations, the sources said, and Deputy Mayor Vanessa Garrett Harley is now involved.
“As with all new pilot programs of this kind, adjustments will continually be made to improve operations as time moves forward,” city spokesperson Joe Grace said Thursday.
The pause comes amid long-simmering tension between the courts and the city over how the program was launched, sources said. Leadership of the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, the Defender Association of Philadelphia, and even the judges tasked with overseeing the court were largely excluded from the city’s plans for the program and how it would operate, sources said. They have felt like the Parker administration did not want their input.
That conflict spilled into open court this month. Municipal Court Judge Henry Lewandowski III, who has presided over most of the wellness court cases so far, said at a hearing in early April that certain politicians in the city think they can “just wave a wand” and fix Kensington’s long-standing drug problems.
“I care way more than they ever will. They’re fake,” he said, adding that officials are trying to build new programs just so they have something to take credit for.
“If I said what I wanted to say,” he said, “I’d have to resign.”
His frustration was clear again Thursday as he oversaw more than 100 summary offense cases, most for fare evasion amid SEPTA‘s new crackdown on turnstile jumping.
“Who knows what program they’ll start by next week,” he said. “Every Wednesday, there’s new stuff, new programs, new procedures. … I’ve never been more confused, I’ve never been more uncertain what my job is.”
Wellness court takes place every Wednesday inside a courtroom at the 24th / 25th Police District.
Wellness court is a signature part of Parker’s plan to shut down Kensington’s notorious open-air drug market and restore quality of life for neighborhood residents.
The court runs on Wednesday afternoons. First, in the morning, police conduct sweeps of the Kensington area and arrest people in addiction for offenses like sleeping on the sidewalk, gathering around an outdoor fire, or stumbling into the street. They are typically charged with summary offenses like obstructing highways.
Those arrested are then brought to the Police-Assisted Diversion program building on Lehigh Avenue, where they are evaluated by a nurse and an addiction specialist. Officials also attempt to address any outstanding arrest warrants, and connect them with a court-appointed attorney hired by the city to discuss their rights.
Finally, they are brought before a judge — Lewandowski has heard most cases so far — inside the nearby police district. They are offered the opportunity to immediately go to rehab or face a summary trial for their alleged crimes. Those who opt to go into treatment and complete the program and terms set by the city will later have their cases dismissed and expunged.
Few in the program have asked for a same-day trial. Those found guilty have so far been ordered to pay fines and court fees ranging from about $200 to $500.
Homelessness and public drug use is widespread in Kensington, the heart of the city’s open-air drug market.
Of the more than 50 people who have come before the court so far, only two had successfully completed treatment as of early April, according to data collected by The Inquirer. The vast majority brought through the program almost immediately leave treatment and do not appear at follow-up hearings, the data show.
The city has declined to share data on wellness court, including with City Council at a recent budget hearing, saying that it is too early to judge the program on numbers alone and that more time is needed to see results.
But the Parker administration said it wants to expand the court and needs more funding for it to succeed. At a recent budget hearing, Geer asked City Council for an additional $3.7 million to operate the court five days a week and hire additional staffers.
The goal, Geer said, is to build a system where people suffering on the streets can immediately be connected with treatment and resources, avoid going to jail, and get housing through the city’s new Riverview Wellness Village. Geer has said that the program will never have a 100% success rate, but that every “touch” the program has with people in addiction increases their likelihood to eventually go into treatment.
But the First Judicial District has said wellness court will not be expanding anytime soon, according to sources.
Civil rights advocates have raised constitutional concerns over the program. In a letter to the Parker administration, the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union said the program could pose a threat to drug users’ rights and questioned whether the city could force people to make consequential legal decisions while potentially under the influence of narcotics.
A 42-year-old man with a history of addiction died inside a Philadelphia jail over the weekend just days after he was arrested in Kensington, officials said.
Andrew Drury was picked up on a bench warrant by Philadelphia police near Kensington and Lehigh Avenues on Thursday night and was found collapsed inside the intake room at Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility on Sunday afternoon, according to police and prison officials. Officers who found Drury administered two doses of Narcan, among other lifesaving measures, but he did not regain consciousness, officials said.
Drury, whose cause of death remains under investigation, was addicted to opioids and had been hospitalized multiple times for withdrawal-related complications when he was jailed in the fall on similar warrant issues, according to a source familiar with his care who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Philadelphia police arrested Drury in Kensington around 10:30 p.m. Thursday on outstanding bench warrants related to a drug case in Maryland and a 2022 violation of a protection-from-abuse order filed in Philadelphia.
Sgt. Eric Gripp, a spokesperson for Philadelphia police, said Drury was evaluated and “received off-site medical treatment” before he was transferred to the jail on State Road around 2:15 a.m. Saturday.
People who use drugs are often gathered near Kensington and Somerset Avenues, an intersection at the heart of Philadelphia’s opioid crisis.
Drury had been in an intake room at the facility for nearly 36 hours, waiting to be assigned to a cell block, when a jail guard found him unresponsive around 1:45 p.m. Sunday, according to John Mitchell, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia prisons. He was pronounced dead at 2 p.m., Mitchell said.
The cause of Drury’s death was under investigation, he said, but no foul play was suspected. Gripp declined to say where and under what circumstances Drury was treated medically while in police custody, citing an ongoing investigation. It is not clear whether Drury was medically evaluated once he arrived at the jail.
Drury is the first person to die in the custody of the Philadelphia Department of Prisons this year, and his death comes as the city ramps up drug enforcement in Kensington and arrests more people in addiction. Advocates have warned city and law enforcement officials that the withdrawal effects for people who use opioids can be life-threatening, and that the understaffed jails might struggle to respond to people’s health needs in those circumstances.
His death follows that of Amanda Cahill, 31,who died inside a cell at the Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center in September, days after she was arrested in Kensington on charges related to drugs and open warrants. The Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office said Tuesday that an autopsy showed Cahill died from drug intoxication.
At least 29 people in addiction have died in Philadelphia jail or police custody since 2018 for reasons that appear connected to drug intoxication or withdrawal, according to medical examiner records reviewed by The Inquirer.
Amanda Cahill, 31, is seen here in a photo provided by her family. She died in Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center in September.
Drury’s legal troubles go back to at least July 2021, when he was arrested for possession with intent to distribute drugs in Maryland, according to court records. Then, in July 2022, he was arrested in Philadelphia for violating a protection-from-abuse order that his mother had filed against him. He was later released on bail.
After Drury failed to appear in court in Maryland and Philadelphia, warrants were issued for his arrest. He was picked up by police on Oct. 1, 2024, in connection with those pending cases.
While in custody, Drury was hospitalized at least twice, including for more than a week, after experiencing health issues related to withdrawal, said the person familiar with his care, who had reviewed the records related to Drury’s earlier cases.
He was released from jail in November after authorities in Maryland declined to extradite him, the source said. Because he did not return to Maryland to resolve his case, there was still an outstanding warrant for his arrest. And when Drury did not appear for a December hearing in his Philadelphia case, a second warrant was issued.
The warrants landed him back in police custody on Thursday.
Two of Drury’s relatives, who asked not to be identified for privacy reasons, said they did not know he was struggling with addiction. They described him as a warm and generous person, a good listener, and a helping hand.
“I feel that something is not right,” one relative said. “I don’t know, and I won’t know, I guess, until I can get the coroner’s report. I’m in the dark right now.”
Andrew Pappas, pretrial managing director of the Defender Association of Philadelphia, said Drury’s death underscores the dangerous conditions inside Philadelphia’s jails, which face an ongoing staffing shortage.
“We continue to see the effects of that with yet another death in custody,” he said.
It was a tough two-and-a-half-week period: Students accused of impersonating ICE agents. One student accused of shooting and killing another. A student stabbing a former student 13 times. And a student falling from a light pole during a post-Eagles celebration and dying from his injuries.
These high-profile incidents involved Temple University students and three of the four occurred on or near campus, posing another test for new president John A. Fry.
Some say they are gratified that the administration communicated swiftly and thoroughly about the incidents, which wasn’t always the case in the past.
“That’s been really great to have such a quick turnaround time,” said Ray Epstein, president of student government. “Even if it is the middle of the night, we are getting an email immediately.”
After Chase Myles, a 20-year-old student from Maryland was shot and killed atabout 11 p.m. Feb. 6, Fry notified the campus in an email at 3:46 a.m., and just hours later was on a plane back to campus from an alumni event in Florida so he could be on the ground to talk to the victim’s parents and help coordinate the response.
By contrast, it took nearly twice as long for the university to get out an email about the shooting death of Samuel Collington outside his off-campus residence in November 2021 even though that happened in the daytime. The email did not come from then-president Jason Wingard, but rather from then-safety chief Charles Leone. The attack put the campus on edge and stirred fear in the Temple community among students, parents, and staff — and social media posts circulatedwith the hashtag “Where’s Wingard,” who laterresigned after less than two years on the job.
Donna Gray, Temple’s campus safety services manager for risk reduction and advocacy services, greets Temple president John A. Fry during his first day of work Nov. 1.
That incident ― which happened as part of an attempted robbery and carjacking ― was different in that it involved random violence by a stranger in the neighborhood.
But even the Temple police officers’ union, which has been critical of university leadership in past years, has noted Fry’s efforts in dealing with the recent multiple incidents.
“He seems to be handling it well,” said Sean Quinn, president of the Temple University Police Association. “Without a doubt, as soon as these things happen, he’s right on top of it.”
“It is up to us to tell the bad news first, personally to all of our community,” he said. “Number two is just to keep a steady stream of communications following that even when there is not a whole lot to say. It’s worth checking in.”
Parents on the university’s family council said they are confident in the university leadership’s handling of the incidents, too.
“It seems like there are the right people in place,” said Allison Borenstein, a Temple alumna whose son, a sophomore, attends the university. “They handled it well, and I think they are on it.”
Borenstein, an event planner at a synagogue who lives in Cherry Hill, noted such incidents could happen near any college campus and said she feels that Temple sometimes gets an unfair rap.
“There’s nothing that the school could have done in advance,” she said.
Emma Legge, an alumna and parent of a senior who lives in New York, said she feels she is kept informed, and she checks in with her son after receiving a communication.
“I do feel as a parent that Temple is doing what it can within the city of Philadelphia to manage what happens,” said Legge, who got both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Temple and met her husband, also a twice Temple alumnus, there. “I have a lot of confidence in the university and the people who are on board.”
Philadelphia Police Commissioner Kevin J. Bethel and Jennifer Griffin, Temple University vice president for public safety, after graduation ceremonies for the Police Academy Class #402, new officers of the Philadelphia Police Department and Temple University Police Department, at Temple’s Performing Arts Center in June.
That includes Jennifer Griffin, vice president for public safety, she said.
“I feel very reassured by the measures police are undertaking to be involved in the neighborhood and be involved with students,” said Legge, who works in student affairs administration at a New York college.
Griffin said after the recentincidents, she met with the student safety advisory committee and its members saidthey appreciated the accurate and timely information, which she said she has always aimed to provide since starting at Temple about two and a half years ago.
“We hope it decreased anxiety,” she said.
Of Fry, she said, “I thought he handled all the incidents with thoughtfulness and decisiveness and direction that I would expect from somebody with his level of experience.”
The police union has been critical of Griffin, even calling for her to resign or be fired over staffing issues. University leadership has backed Griffin.
Quinn said the union now is trying to work things out, noting that the university is amid a police staffing study conducted by an external company.
“I just don’t want to come to work every day feeling like I’m butting heads,” he said. “I actually would like to work with whoever I have to work with to see if we can accomplish things.”
Fry said he expects to have the results of the staffing study in a couple months. He said he’s pleased with the work campus police do, noting he had gone on ride alongs with them and wants to make sure they have enough help.
Ray Epstein, Temple student government president.
While Epstein, the student government president, endorsed the university’s handling of communication about the recent shooting, she said it also should have issued an alert after a report about a student placing hidden cameras in a fraternity bathroom in late November and recording people without their knowledge. Instead the campus learned of it through social media earlier this month, she said. The student has been arrested and charged in that case.
“I was not sure when or if the fraternity/university would ever disclose this incident, but I wanted to inform everyone in case this was never announced,” someone posted on a Temple Reddit page, with court documents about the case.
“Maybe it’s perceived by campus safety as not being an ongoing threat,” Epstein said. “I’d argue that it is because when these things happen in a house, you can’t possibly know until an investigation is concluded who all was involved.”
Griffin countered that the investigation was handled swiftly, the individual was identified and arrested, and there was no ongoing threat to the community. A Temple alert is sent when there is an immediate threat to the community, she said.
In this case, people who lived in the house notified law enforcement after the equipment was found, the equipment was taken and the individual who put it there was identified, she said.
“The people who called in the cameras were cooperative,” she said. “It was an isolated incident at an off-campus residence … and student affairs reached out to those who were impacted.”
PITTSBURGH — And just like that the NHL’s trade deadline is almost here.
After a rambunctious two weeks focused on the 4 Nations Face-Off, all eyes are now turned to the league’s annual wheelin’ and dealin.’
Flyers general manager Danny Brière could be busy before the clock strikes 3 p.m. on March 7 as he continues to shape the roster in his long-term vision. He already traded homegrown forwards Joel Farabee and Morgan Frost at the end of January, as he, and the brass, decide who is on the bus.
So who is next to go, if anyone? We broke down the Flyers roster one week out from the trade deadline.
Scott Laughton, C/LW: Every year Laughton is rumored to be on the trade block. The forward is well-equipped to handle the chatter by now, but could this be the year he is finally moved? A reliable two-way center who can also be productive on the wing and as a penalty killer, Laughton has versatility that is attractive to teams looking to make a Stanley Cup run. He also has one year left after this season at a $3 million cap hit and would not just be a rental for rumored landing spots, including Winnipeg, which the Flyers play on Saturday, and his hometown Toronto Maple Leafs. He also would bring value to any locker room.
Rasmus Ristolainen, D: If coach John Tortorella had his way, the Flyers would keep the blueliner because, “If you trade him Friday, then on Saturday, you say, [expletive], I need a big, right-handed defenseman.” Ristolainen also has term — two years beyond this season at a $5.1 million clip — and, what Tortorella considers, a favorable contract. But there is no denying Ristolainen is a marquee trade chip for the Flyers as teams look to get bigger for the postseason.
Erik Johnson, D: Johnson, who turns 37 next month, is a pending unrestricted free agent and could be a good option for a playoff team looking to add depth to its defensive core. Although he hasn’t played much this season, he has looked steady when called upon and has the postseason experience — i.e., a Stanley Cup — teams look for in a sixth or seventh blueliner.
The Flyers have a decision to make with Rasmus Ristolainen, who is signed for two seasons beyond this one.
Which Flyers could be traded if the price is right?
Bobby Brink, RW: Tortorella recently said Brink, in a good way, “plays every game worrying about … just staying in his spot.” The forward has played well and is setting career highs while playing a better defensive game. He shouldn’t get moved, but his stock is on the rise.
Nick Deslauriers, LW: The veteran enforcer has one more year after this season at $1.75 million. A good guy in the room, he hasn’t played much this season — he did miss a good chunk with an injury — but could be utilized for a team as a fourth liner who protects guys during the rough-and-tumble postseason.
Garnet Hathaway, RW, and Nick Seeler, D: Every team, including the Flyers, wants guys like this. Should they be moved? No, but it may make sense if the return is well above the asking price.
Andrei Kuzmenko, LW: Now on his third team in three years, the Russian winger comes with question marks. He has the skill but seems to start strong with clubs before stalling. Tortorella likes what he has seen in a few short weeks, and Kuzmenko’s coachability. But there could be suitors for a guy who can find the back of the net, so the Flyers could flip him. If they do, he is an unrestricted free agent this summer and could always return on a cheaper deal if both parties were so inclined.
Egor Zamula, D: Is the defenseman going to be on the bus? That is the big question right now. He has shown growth at times but is still struggling to find his game and could be a good fit for a team looking to rebuild its blue line.
Ivan Fedotov/Aleksei Kolosov, G: Although there is rampant speculation as to why Kolosov is still on the NHL roster, the Flyers cannot persist with the three-headed monster in net. One of the guys should either get sent down to the American Hockey League — Kolosov is waiver-exempt — or one should be traded.
Which Flyers are unlikely to get traded?
Sean Couturier, C: It’s no secret the former Selke Trophy winner hasn’t been the same since undergoing two back surgeries in 2022. The injuries came just after he had signed an eight-year, $62 million ($7.75 million average annual value) contract to become the face of the Flyers. Couturier is still a responsible defensive center, but no team is trading for a 32-year-old whose best hockey looks to be behind him, and who has five years remaining at his hefty cap hit.
Emil Andrae, D: Limited in stature but not in heart and drive, Andrae is ready to become an NHL regular now. It should be with the Flyers, who need his puck-moving ability. The one exception would be if he’s part of a larger package to land the big-time center the Flyers need.
Jamie Drysdale, D: Teams need guys like Drysdale, with his ability — like Andrae — to move the puck and generate offense from the back end. That said, he is still very much a work in progress. If they were to move him, the only positive for the Flyers is that he looked fantastic against the Pittsburgh Penguins on Tuesday night, especially when he broke up a pass intended for Sidney Crosby and then delivered the primary assist up the ice.
Could Cam York be a surprise trade candidate ahead of March 7?
Cam York, D: He was once thought to be untouchable, but York’s status is not as defined with the Flyers. After a stellar 2023-24, in which Tortorella called him the team’s best defender, he has struggled to find that level this season. He did deal with a shoulder injury early in the year that seemed to stunt his growth but has played better of late.
Noah Cates, C, and Tyson Foerster, LW/RW: Highly unlikely, but they are both restricted free agents who are expected to earn big raises this summer after the seasons they are having. The Flyers need centers and Cates has finally emerged as a top-three pivot, so there’s a low probability he will be moved. Foerster’s chances are a bit higher as teams would love his defensive game with a big shot brimming under the surface.
Ryan Poehling, C, and Owen Tippett, LW/RW: Very unlikely. When confident, Tippett is becoming the guy everyone expected with his speed and skill. He should score 30 goals consistently. Like Tippett, Poehling adds speed to the lineup and is the solid bottom-six center the Flyers have use for, especially if Laughton dealt.
Jakob Pelletier, LW: The Flyers just got the winger, who has some upside as a former first-round pick. He’s a restricted free agent this summer and will be signed for cheap, so no reason to make a rash move — unless he’s part of that big center package we talked about it.
Who on the Flyers is untouchable?
Travis Konecny, RW: Signed to an eight-year extension last summer, the All-Star winger is just hitting his prime and his stride. Konecny has established himself as a bona fide top-line player and is on pace for a career-high 86 points.
Matvei Michkov, RW: Obviously.
Travis Sanheim, D: The other half of “The Travii” is having a breakout season, becoming one of the NHL’s top defensemen in terms of stamina and versatility. The top-pair blueliner boasts a rare combination of size (6-foot-4, 222 pounds) and skating ability, which he just showcased on the international stage. Sanheim, who turns 29 next month, also has a full no-trade clause through the 2026-27 season.
Sam Ersson, G: People want to question whether he is a No. 1 goalie. Why? The Swede continues to prove he can carry the load of games and the weight of being among the NHL’s best. Just look at his stats since the Christmas break — 11-4-2 with a .912 save percentage — and that doesn’t include his stellar performance vs. the United States at the 4 Nations Face-Off.
Goalie Samuel Ersson has played himself into untouchable status, according to Jackie Spiegel.
