Residents blast DeFeo house circus August 26, 1976

About 27 Ocean Avenue residents complained bitterly about massive trespassing, littering and property destruction by hooligan curiosity seekers in their area at Monday night’s village board meeting.

Spectators have been mobbing the grounds of the former DeFeo home on Ocean Avenue and the surrounding area for the last few months, residents told the board.

The house was the scene where six members of the DeFeo family were murdered in November 1974. The eldest son of the family, Ronald DeFeo, 24, was convicted of the killings last November but is expected to appeal the case .

A New York daily newspaper’s feature article earlier this summer is believed to have caused the initial barrage of crowds but over this weekend the same paper printed three letters to the editor on the subject and the Record learned of still another sensationalist rendering of the event which appeared July 25 in an English daily.

The Ocean Avenue residents said they were grateful for the village’s action of posting no parking signs and assigning police to the area but they said the situation had gotten completely out of hand. Ocean Avenue resident Edmund O’Connor Jr. told the board that the intruder situation had started to die down but quickly flared up last week.

He said that Amityville policemen assigned to the area just parked in the DeFeo driveway so that the surrounding area was not protected. O’Connor said the police would arrive and chase the intruders away but that within five minutes the curiosity-seekers had returned.

Amityville Acting Police Chief Ed Lowe told the Ocean Avenue resident that since July, 12 persons had been arrested, there were 47 requests for police assistance and 51 summonses were issued.

O’Connor replied that 551 summonses should have been issued. Acting Chief Lowe said that on one occasion when he went down to the area, he recognized local residents. "What they were doing there I don’t know," he said.

O’Connor read a letter from Ocean Avenue resident Rufus Ireland II explaining that he (Ireland) found a butane torch on his front lawn one morning after crowds of people had run wild over the area.

South Ireland Place resident Walter Saxton told the board that in the mornings after the intruders had left, he found empty beer bottles, soft drink cans, coffee cups, pizza pie crusts and other litter in his yard.

Saxton said the curiosity seekers knocked down fences, committed petty thefts and turned their cars around on residents’ lawns. He assured the board that it was not his intention to criticize the efforts of the Amityville police but he raised the question whether the board was cognizant of the gravity of the matter.

A number of other residents told the board about numerous incidents involving the trespassers. Mayor Humbert martin asked that representatives of the residents meet with the board after the village board meeting adjourned.

He later told the Record that police patrols of the area would not be changed but that new stringent measures are being implemented to discourage people from coming near the vicinity.