Local News for Northampton

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AP Photo/Michael DwyerKerry Harrington, center, and Sara Laporte, right, both of Boston, react while watching the Super Bowl at a Hub bar Sunday evening. The shot was taken before the New England Patriots fell to the New York Giants, 21-17, marking the Giants’ second Super Bowl triumph over the Pats in four years.

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• UVA lacrosse player murder trial poised to get underway [abcnews.go.com]


• Man falls from 200-foot ledge at Connecticut park [courant.com]


• Former UMass receiver Victor Cruz on Super Bowl victory: ‘I dreamed of this moment’ [gazettenet.com]


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• Super Bowl ads are super letdown [bostonherald.com]


• Opinion: A new Mitt Romney rides into town [philly.com]




AP Video: Authorities believe Josh Powell, husband of missing Utah woman, intentionally caused explosion that killed him and his two sons.




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Acting on tips from the public, Northampton and Holyoke police arrested 33-year-old Thadius Romanowski.

Northampton PoliceA still taken from bank security footage shows a man suspected of robbing the 176 King St. Florence Savings Bank branch Friday afternoon.

HOLYOKE – Security images from a Northampton bank targeted in a Friday robbery led to the arrest of a Holyoke man early Saturday morning.

The suspect entered the Florence Savings Bank branch at 176 King St. around 4 p.m. Friday and handed a teller a note claiming he had a bomb. He then fled on foot with an undisclosed amount of cash.

Police began receiving tips, however, after distributing still images of the suspect from the bank’s security cameras to area media outlets.

Acting on those tips, Northampton and Holyoke police arrested Thadius Romanowski, 33, of 579 Northampton St. Unit 14 at his home in Holyoke at 3:29 a.m. Saturday.

Romanowski was charged with unarmed robbery in connection with the incident. He is being held on $10,000 bail.

No weapons were shown during the robbery, and there were no injuries, Northampton police Lt. Michael Patenaude said Friday.

The branch was also the site of a Dec. 22, 2010 robbery that came during a string of at least a half-dozen heists in Hampshire and Hampden counties.

The jury of seven men and five women are scheduled to resume deliberations Monday morning.

This is an updated version of a story posted at 1:11 this afternoon.

Photo by Dave Roback / The RepublicanDavid Fried Oppenheim, left, stands with his lawyers, Luke Ryan and David Hoose, in Hampshire Superior Court Friday afternoon watching the jury exit for the day.

NORTHAMPTON – The jury in the David Fried Oppenheim child rape case spent about two hours deliberating Friday afternoon before stopping for the weekend.

The jury of seven men and five women are scheduled to continue Monday morning.

Five witnesses in the trial testified that Fried Oppenheim either admitted his sexual escapades to them or had sex with him, including one who said she was 14 and 15 when they had sex.

Fried Oppenheim, taking the stand in his own defense, maintained his innocence, saying none of it is true.

Someone has been telling big lies in Hampshire Superior Court, and now its up to a jury of 12 to decide who that is.

Fried Oppenheim, 38, faces five counts of child rape, each regarding a different kind of sex act, involving a girl who acted at the Pioneer Art Center of Easthampton, which the defendant founded. The alleged victim, now 20, said Fried Oppenheim developed a sexual relationship with her while teaching her an acting method he invented called “primitives,” in which he urged her to keep a journal describing her physical reactions to emotional situations. She said she was 14 when the sexual relationship began.

Other prosecution witnesses in the case include a woman who said she had sex with Fried Oppenheim more than 100 times while she was 17 and acting at PACE and another who testified that Fried Oppenheim told her she was “hot” and offered to waive her fees for the center in exchange for sex.

Two other witnesses told the jury that Fried Oppenheim admitted to them his liaison with the underage girl, including one who produced copies of an instant message exchange in which a person purported to be the defendant described having sex with the 14-year-old girl in lurid detail.

Fried Oppenheim, who testified on his own behalf, denied all of it, saying he never had sex with either the alleged victim or the other woman and that he never confessed such a relationship to anyone. Members of his family, who also testified for the defense, painted a picture of PACE as a bustling art center where it would have been impossible to have sex without being seen. They also depicting the prosecution witnesses as needy, attention-seeking and untrustworthy.

In his closing arguments Friday, defense lawyer David P. Hoose picked up on that theme, suggesting that the witnesses – four young women and one who has transitioned from female to male – made up their stories for various reasons.

“They’re all little actresses,” he said. “They’re into the drama.”

Hoose contended that none of the testimony about instant messages or telephone calls with the defendant have been forensically corroborated, and he called the charges against his client “Kafkaesque.”

“Proof beyond a reasonable doubt is the last refuge of an innocent man,” he said, “and no case can illustrate that better than this case.”

Hoose described the alleged victim to the jury as someone who did not come forward with her complaint against Fried Oppenheim until several years after the fact, when she was under stress at college in New York. Citing the woman’s testimony that she threw out the potentially incriminating journal she kept for her “primitives” experience, he called the act “preposterous.” Hoose suggested that the allegations didn’t arise until the alleged victim was having a crisis with her boyfriend.

“No one who is sexually molested at 14 can fail to show some symptom of it to the people around them,” he said.

Hoose attempted to cast similar doubt on the testimony of the other witnesses, calling the transgender witness “a professional at fooling people.”

“At the end of the day,” he said, “all we have here are just actresses.”

Pisano called Hoose’s theory about the alleged victim’s timing “ludicrous.” Taking issue with Hoose’s interpretation of the woman’s demeanor on the stand, she invited the jury to decide for themselves whether she was credible. During her first day of testimony, the judge called a recess when the woman broke down on the stand describing her anal rape.

“All the evidence you need is if you believe her,” she said.

However, Pisano said, her testimony was backed up by no fewer than four other witnesses who had been at PACE. She also cited testimony by the alleged victim’s parents that they drove her to the center on almost a daily basis, far more frequently than Fried Oppenheim said she was there.

Pisano’s closing picked up on her cross-examination of the defendant, which took place immediately before on Friday. During that often tense questioning, Fried Oppenheim maintained that nearly all the damning testimony against him was false. He only qualified his stance when asked about the testimony of the woman who said he suggested she give him sex in exchange for fees. In that case, Fried Oppenheim acknowledged he might have made some inappropriate remarks but said he couldn’t remember exactly what he said because he was ill at the time.