Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney Talks Guns, Gangs, Gilgo and More at Hampton Bays American Legion Post

Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney was on hand at Hampton Bays American Legion Post 424 on Wednesday, September 20, to discuss, among other things, his vow to bring back “ShotSpotter” technology to Suffolk County, a high-tech crime fighting system that uses microphones deployed in a given area to identify when a gun has been fired.

“You guys don’t have a big gun problem,” Ray Tierney told a chuckling and supportive crowd gathered last Wednesday for a meet-and-greet with the Suffolk County district attorney at the American Legion’s invitation.

The ShotSpotter technology was adopted in 2011 but abandoned in Suffolk County in 2019, only to be revived when Tierney was elected district attorney in 2021, and with $1.8 million voted on in 2022 by the Suffolk County Legislature to pay for its return to 11 high-crime communities.

Tierney said the technology was warranted, given the gun violence in some Suffolk County communities, including nearby Shirley and Mastic Beach in Brookhaven Town, leading to his quip about the relative safety of Hampton Bays when it comes to gun violence.

Half of all incidents involving guns in Suffolk County, he said, occur on less than 1 percent of the county’s sprawling land mass, “and most of it is gang-related,” he said. That criminality, he said, “radiates outward” to impact places like Hampton Bays that don’t otherwise have a lot of built-in criminality.

The return of ShotSpotter was one subject among many that Tierney brought up before a law-and-order friendly audience, and he spent a minute or two to talk about the arrest of Rex Heuermann, the alleged Gilgo serial killer, who is now in lockup at the Suffolk County Jail in Riverside.

Heuermann and his attorneys, along with the DA’s office, had a conference scheduled for today, September 27, in Riverside. He has pleaded not guilty in the death of three women whose bodies were discovered more than a decade ago buried in the reeds at Gilgo Beach.

Despite the Gilgo case gaining international attention, Tierney stressed that in the end, “I don’t see it as different from other cases,” by way of explaining that there are lots of heinous or otherwise high-profile crimes going on in the county, some of which spill onto the South Fork.

He mentioned last year’s brazen midday theft of more than $90,000 worth of handbags at Balenciaga in East Hampton by a snatch-and-grab crew out of New Jersey — most of whom were wearing GPS ankle bracelets owing to previous convictions on similar charges — and also provided detail on the more recent multi-agency drugs-guns-and-gangs investigation leading to the indictment of 30 persons on 132 charges.

That investigation highlighted ongoing gang activity on Long Island, and the indictment included two Southampton Town men who were charged with dealing narcotics that Southampton Town Police Chief James Kiernan recently said had included lots of illicit sales in Hampton Bays and Riverside.

Kiernan, a Hampton Bays resident, was at the American Legion Hall the week before Tierney for a meet-and-greet of his own, said David Agtsteribbe, finance director at the facility located on Ponquogue Avenue. The Legion hosts regular events with political candidates and public figures, he said, and also puts on fundraising events such as comedy nights and other features.

As a tough-on-crime prosecutor who ran as an independent but gets a lot of his support from Republicans, Tierney faced a friendly, older crowd in Hampton Bays of about two dozen that included former police officers and military veterans, along with residents concerned about vagrancy and quality-of-life crimes, as he highlighted some of the successes and challenges he faces as district attorney in the state’s second largest county.

Tierney has been focused on a trifecta of guns, gangs and drugs, he said, which has yielded a few big cross-county indictments and has put a major emphasis on the pernicious impacts of fentanyl on communities across Suffolk County, along with the ongoing presence of organized gangs responsible for much of the gun violence here.

The State Department of Health says that most overdose deaths in the state involve fentanyl, which is somewhere between 50 and 100 times more powerful than heroin.

The local office of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration describes fentanyl as the “most dangerous drug to ever hit the streets,” and said it has led to more than 6,000 overdose deaths in the state.

That statistic tracks to Suffolk County, which has seen 30 homicides over the past year compared with 400 overdose deaths from opioids including fentanyl, Tierney said.

Neither number is acceptable, he said, but the 400 overdose deaths signaled an outsized problem in the county and one that law enforcement agencies across the country are struggling to get under control.

“Two milligrams can kill you,” Tierney said of fentanyl — about the size of a grain of rice.

Tierney also talked about “Tranq,” the street name for a powerful animal tranquilizer, xylazinet, that has appeared in a powerful and occasionally deadly street-drug mix of cocaine and fentanyl — noting that he can’t charge people in possession of Tranq because the compound is not illegal in New York State.

Responding to one impassioned inquiry from an audience member about human trafficking on Long Island, Tierney admitted it was one area that “we’re not doing a good enough job addressing,” noting that his office was “just starting to scratch the surface” when it comes to human trafficking.

Human trafficking can involve so-called “unaccompanied youth” who arrive at the country’s southern border without their parents or other relatives, and are highly vulnerable to exploitation, said Tierney, noting the cruel reality in this world, where the younger the victim, “the more money you will make.”

On that front, this week Tierney announced the indictment of Dominick Umbrino, 70, of Ridge, who was charged with multiple counts of possessing and electronically storing thousands of images of children being sexually abused. Tierney tied that arrest to the larger issue of human sex trafficking.

“Downloading and viewing depictions of children suffering unspeakable sexual abuse is despicable, and it creates a demand and market for the horrific trafficking of innocent children,” Tierney said in a release announcing Umbrino’s arrest. He faces dozens of felony charges.