Relatives demand answers

By Chris McKenna
Times Herald-Record

Blooming Grove - Anger over the police shooting of Emil Mann deep in the woods of northern New Jersey escalated yesterday as relatives and fellow Ramapough Indians kept pressing authorities to explain why a weekend cookout ended with gunfire.

As the 41-year-old Blooming Grove man remained in critical condition at Hackensack University Medical Center, tribe members welcomed a stream of reporters to a Ramapough community center near the shooting site in Mahwah, N.J., to question what could have led state park police to open fire.

"Tell us why," said Anthony J. Van Dunk, the 43-year-old chief of roughly 5,000 Ramapoughs nationwide, many concentrated in northern New Jersey and southern New York. "Why did they go over the top?"

Authorities have released only minimal information about the shooting. Bergen (N.J.) County Prosecutor John Molinelli's office said Sunday that Mann was shot and his cousin, Otis Mann, was arrested about 4:15 p.m. Saturday in what were described as separate incidents in the same vicinity of the Ramapo Valley County Reservation.

Prosecutors say Otis Mann, 42, who lives in Blooming Grove, scuffled with a state park police officer, took her baton, then used it to menace her and another park police officer.

He was being held in Bergen County Jail yesterday, charged with aggravated assault, possession of a weapon for unlawful purposes, resisting arrest and obstruction of justice.

Molinelli couldn't be reached yesterday. His office complained Sunday that uncooperative witnesses had slowed its investigation.

Relatives who say they attended the weekend gathering told the Times Herald-Record yesterday that about 15 of them were grilling fish at their usual woodland hangout when friends alerted them that several park police officers had hopped onto all-terrain vehicles and were heading into the woods in their direction.

Morris Mann, who got one of those phone calls, recalls being warned that the police "tore out of here like a bunch of cowboys."

Morris Mann, 34, a nephew of Emil Mann, who also lives in Blooming Grove, said he and the others departed the campground to avoid trouble, but some ran into the police. He heard loud voices and then two gunshots.

He and his uncle both work for the Town of Ramapo Parks and Recreation Department. Emil Mann, who operates backhoes and other equipment for the department, lives with his wife and three sons in the Glenwood Hills section of Mountain Lodge Park, the former resort community in Blooming Grove.

"Uncle Emil's the kind of person who would give you the shirt off his back," Kelli Martucci, the wife of another Emil Mann nephew, said. "All of our main concern is just his getting better. We're all praying for him."