Third bullet to hit house worries authorities

Chester suggests gun club seek NRA safety certification, By Pamela Chergotis Chester — The third bullet to hit a house in Chester has prompted a local gun club to shut down one of its shooting ranges, at least temporarily. The Monroe-Chester Sportsmen Club held a pistol competition at its rifle range on Saturday, July 21. Early that afternoon, Emily Boardman was at her home on Sugar Loaf Mountain Road, recuperating from hip replacement surgery, when a bullet lodged in one of her front windows. It tore the screen and broke the first pane of the double-pane glass but not the second. “Quite frankly, I am scared and though I hate to have to again [bring up] the question, I think it would be highly irresponsible if I did otherwise,” Boardman said in an e-mailed message. “There are too many of us who are living with an angst that is inappropriate and unhealthy. Let us act before a serious injury or worse occurs.” The Warwick Advertiser talked to three of her neighbors who said they, too, were afraid, especially for their children or visiting grandchildren. This is not the first time Boardman has found a stray bullet at her house. In 2003 a bullet lodged into a wooden chair on her deck. Years earlier, in 1995, she found a spent round lying on top of the deck. All along she believed the bullets were coming from the gun club. But officials from both the Town of Chester and the gun club were doubtful. They told The Warwick Advertiser four years ago the bullets were probably coming from one of her other neighbors. The gun club was safe, they said, because of the wide, high buffers around the shooting areas, and the club’s strong emphasis on safety and training — precautions that neighbors shooting targets would be less likely to have. They did not believe a bullet would be able to make it out of the club property at all. But this time around, these same doubters seem to be more open to the idea that the bullet may indeed have come from the gun club. As town Supervisor William Tully put it at a board meeting Wednesday night, “There was a time when they [the gun club] weren’t listening as much, but now they’re listening more.” Mark Dorfman, the gun club president, said Wednesday he doesn’t think the latest bullet came from the club — but he was less definite this time than four years ago. He shut down the club’s rifle range, which faces Boardman’s house. He even offered to pay for Boardman’s window — but stressed he was doing it not as an admission of guilt but as a “goodwill gesture” and to be a good neighbor. Boardman told The Warwick Advertiser that Dorfman has been very kind to her. Dorfman said the rifle range will stay closed until the club can figure out what happened Saturday. The club was established long before most of the houses around it were built, and has had to fend off opposition for more than 25 years, as building picked up in the area. Michael Sussman and Leonard Silver, who live nearby, tried unsuccessfully in 2004 to sue the club and the town’s zoning board of appeals, saying that town code prohibited membership clubs from having outdoor firing ranges. Tully noted Wednesday that the area around the gun club, once very rural, is “probably the fastest-growing part of town.” “I’m gun-shy — pardon the pun,” Dorfman said, referring to the years of opposition against the club. Tully said three bullets landing on the same house had convinced him something must be done. He said he is not an expert and cannot tell for sure where the bullet came from. But, he said, looking at the way the screen was torn, it looked as if the bullet came straight down from the sky. Tully said he has been in touch with a representative from the National Rifle Association to see if the organization offered a safety certification that would ensure the best-possible practices at the club. He said he advised the club to keep the rifle range closed until it could obtain this certification. Town police Chief Brian Jarvis also did not rule out the club as the origin of the latest bullet. “Basically, we have to keep our minds open,” Jarvis told The Warwick Advertiser. “Yes, it is possible that it came from the gun club, but we cannot close our minds to the possibility that it did not.” According to Jarvis, the bullet was a .44 caliber. “This could be either a pistol or a rifle,” he said. “However, I believe the pistols are more common.” Boardman’s next-door neighbor Roberta Walsh, the mother of two children, said, “If they really believed it didn’t come from the gun club, there would be a manhunt. Why aren’t we searching high and low for a sniper?” Jarvis said that Detective Sal Ardisi was assigned to follow up on the case. He said the police have done “extensive work” at the club to identify the shooter. “However, without a specific gun to match the striations to, this will be nearly impossible to do,” he said. “As it was, there were numerous people shooting this caliber on that date. The gun club had several safety officers there monitoring the shooting to insure nobody was doing anything in a reckless manner. The way the bullet hit the window, it penetrated the screen and one pane of glass, but did not penetrate the second pane of glass, indicating that it probably had a low velocity.” All of the neighbors that The Warwick Advertiser spoke to said they understood before they moved in that the gun club was a long-established institution in their community. Several said they appreciated having hundreds of acres of beautiful woodlands preserved in their area. They realize the trade-off involved — green space in exchange for tolerating some of the club’s less-attractive features, like the noise. But they want to work with the club to make the neighborhood safe from stray bullets. “It’s not a black-and-white type of situation,” said Roberta Morrow, who likes to take walks with her children in their neighborhood. The club is “good for recreation, good for preserving space — almost like a nature preserve,” she said. “But they need to work together with their neighbors. We should have a chance to sit down with them and talk about how to make it better.” Paula Spector, who lives on a private road off Sugar Loaf Mountain Road, said the gun club frightens her and her granddaughter, a frequent visitor. She talked about an incident on Sugar Loaf Mountain Road years ago, when a visitor to the neighborhood was grazed by a bullet while outside on a deck. Another neighbor, Kristin Walsh, said she takes walks along the road with her baby and her dog. When she moved in, she was comforted that the club was surrounded by a generous buffer and adopted a “live and let live” attitude toward it. “I haven’t historically given it a lot of thought,” she said. But the latest incident has her worried. “It’s not just random,” she said. “I would hope that the people in the gun club would understand what it’s like to be sitting in your house and to have a bullet hit it.”