As police continue their investigation into the murder of a Peekskill woman on the grounds of the Veterans Affairs facility in Montrose, readers have been following the developments, as well as reading about the life of Sabrina Rasa, the 39-year-old mother of three, prostitute and drug addict who was killed. They are concerned about reports that she had several “clients” at the facility and what that might indicate about security and oversight on behalf of the veterans. There is also some discussion about the turns her life took and the hardship she dealt with, especially after seeing pictures of her from earlier in her life compared to recent photos.

No one deserves to die, no matter what their lifestyle may have been. She can be a prostitute & drug addict and also a good person. I hope police take a good look at this case, it’s disturbing. … Serial killers like to prey on prostitutes. It’s usually their starting points for many of them. So, this is very worrisome.

I know that one is not supposed to speak ill of the dead, and there is no way that this is the kind of death someone – anyone – would choose. But to talk about her “warm personality” and her ability to keep you “laughing and joking,” as well as that she was a “real, real good person” when she was a known drug addict and prostitute seems like a rather desperate effort on the parts of the reporters to “humanize” someone that most of us would go out of our way(s) to ignore if we saw her on the street – and certainly to shield our children from.

Sabrina was a very sweet person who made some very bad choices. Those choices do not diminish her humanity and the fact she a very sweet and caring person, created and belonging to the same God as you and me. I cannot defend her actions as it was her choices that led her down the wrong path. … Before you speak harshly about Sabrina’s choices and lifestyle at the time of her death, remember we all have things is our past we are not proud of and would hate to see on the front page of the paper.

Maybe if the VA took security a little more seriously then this woman/prostitute/drug addict would never have been allowed onto the grounds and may still be alive today. The people there protected our country for years, the least we can do for them is to protect them.

It’s happened again. Patients going in for care have ended up with a deadly disease because of improper medical procedures. This time, at least six patients were diagnosed with Hepatitis C after undergoing colonoscopies at Veterans Administration hospitals in Tennessee, Miami and Georgia. All three sites failed to properly sterilize equipment between treatments, according to this USA Today article. Thousands have been warned about the risk.

Last spring, nearly 40,000 people were alerted that they should be tested for hepatitis C, along with hepatitis B and HIV after reports that a Las Vegas clinic had been reusing syringes and vials of medication for nearly four years. In 2007, a Long Island anesthesiologist at a pain clinic re-used syringes and also exposed people to such blood-borne diseases.

After last year’s Las Vegas incident, state Assemblyman Kenneth Zebrowski, D-New City and state Sen. Thomas Morahan, R-New City, introduced a bundle of bills that, among other things, strengthens the charges for those who infect patients with communicable diseases through reckless conduct.

His father, the late state Assemblyman P. Kenneth Zebrowski, had contracted Hepatitis C from a blood transfusion in the early 1970s. It wasn’t detected for more than two decades.  “My dad’s case is all too typical,” the younger Zebrowski told to the Editorial Board last year.

This news that VA medical facilities had not performed basic sterilization of equipment—and protected patients—is just heartbreaking.

Readers suffering through rounds of layoffs in the private sector are scoffing at the reaction to Gov. David Paterson’s announcement that he could be laying off 8,900 state workers that come under his control. Specifically, they are trouncing the head of the Civil Service Employees Association Danny Donohue, who said in Albany Bureau reporter Joseph Spector’s story yesterday: “We’ve been trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, but if Gov. Paterson really believes putting nearly 9,000 New Yorkers out of work is a good idea, he really is out of touch with life on Main Street.”

It’s Donohue who is out of touch with the average citizen, readers counter. And while they think that layoffs are a necessary first step into trying to get the state’s costs under control (pensions and benefits are other targets of their ire), this move doesn’t redeem the governor in their eyes.

Of course, the unions do have their defenders. Several people are saying this is exactly the kind of situation they were meant to protect workers from. Others are saying they deserve every penny they get and all their benefits since private sector employees have had it good for so many years and look down on state workers.

Here are some more comments:

The unions must not give in anymore. Paterson must find other ways to balance the budget or get the heck out of office.

When will the union leaders learn that their lavish benefits spread comes at a cost of jobs and financial stability for their members?

As much as I’m not a big supporter of Paterson, the unions are not willing to make any concessions, so in these times you do what you have to do. The unions are not what they were once were.

Gov. Paterson, look in your own backyard first! All those over-paid commissioners and directors of this department and that department, well they need to go first. It’s called consolidation of management!

Neither rain nor snow, nor sleet nor dark of night can stop the U.S. Postal Service, but a recession? USA Today reports here on the Postmaster General, John Potter, spelling out the dire financial problems facing the agency, which lost $2.8 billion last year and is expected to lose more this year.

Hours will be cut April 18 at some local post offices (see article here). Potter is seeking permission to reduce mail delivery from six days to five days a week. There’s also been talk of closing more rural post offices, but, to me, that seems like it would truly harm those with little access to mail delivery.

“At this moment, the survival of the Postal Service — a venerable institution that is literally older than our country — hangs in the balance,” National Association of Letter Carriers President William Young said today during testimony in front of a House subcommittee

While officials say the economic slowdown has contributed to a mail drop, what’s not discussed is the fact that, no matter the condition of the economy, more and more of us send out less and less mail. When was the last time you paid a bill by letter, or visited the post office? I still do, but not very often.

So, do you see five-day-a-week mail delivery in the 21st century as a problem? Cutting post office hours?

photo: Nyack Post Office/2001 Journal News file photo

Readers always say we focus on the negative and sensational news, and why can’t we talk about all the good stuff that happens in the Lower Hudson Valley. So reporter Mike Risinit’s story about two wayward goats that were meandering down Interstate 684 between Bedford and Armonk yesterday was appreciated for its happy ending. The animals were finally corralled by several good Samaritans and taken to a farm in Putnam for safekeeping until they could be picked up by their owner. Several readers also couldn’t help but draw some connections between this story and a one a few weeks ago about a dead goat being found outside Assemblyman Greg Ball’s house in Putnam.

Here’s what people had to say:

A big thank you to the goats and the people who helped them. It’s a very needed bit of levity and a good chuckle in light of all the other stories in the news today.

Ohhhh, those poor babies! Thank you to all who helped rescue them.

Saw this headline and first reaction that it was another Ball stunt. However, after reading it, seems these frisky goats just wandered to far. Glad they were returned to home, safe and sound.

Actually, these goats HERD what happened to the UDDER goat in Putnam and decided to head south. Greg BAAAAAAAAALL is going to have a hard time finding them.

Lazying about with nothing to do? Not too interested in going over the bills on your desk or finishing up that 2008 income tax return? Take a gander at what the people we elect, and those who are appointed to run state government, earn.

Thanks to the Empire Center for New York State Policy, “a project of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research,’’ a conservative and fiscal think-tank, there is a Web site with data bases on all kinds of information — including payrolls for local school districts, villages, towns, cities, counties and public authorities throughout New York state.

Let’s hear it for transparency.

Today, the center announced it posted the payrolls for the state’s executive, legislative and judicial branches for 2008.

Visit www.seethroughny.net and poke around a bit. It’s educational — after all, these are our local and state tax dollars at work. And cruising the site sure beats doing your own financial paperwork.

Reader reaction has been swift and vehement to the settlement Westchester County has tentatively reached with the family of a 7-year-old Connecticut boy who was killed on a ride at the county-owned amusement park. The boy, Jon-Kely Cassara, was killed on the Ye Old Mill, an indoor water ride, when he exited the car and was caught under water between two conveyer belts.

On one hand, several comments suggest that the parents are purely to blame for allowing their child to get on the ride, even though they couldn’t supervise him. Others say that the county rightfully is to blame based on a park employee’s testimony that the ride was insufficiently staffed.

Here’s the latest update by reporter Jorge Fitz-Gibbon. Then tell us what you think.

This is another reason why Westchester County should close or sell Playland. Playland’s time has come and long gone.

The family of this boy should be ashamed of themselves for making the county shell out taxpayer dollars for something that is purely the fault of the parents.

How dare you write such an insensitive heartless comment. These poor people live with the horror of their sons’ death everyday. … Did you not read what the park’s former manager said? The fact that the ride was not suffieicently staffed? … God bless that poor little boy and his family. May he rest in peace.

Perhaps had Playland been modernized, it could have had the same type of closed-circuit monitoring that car tunnels do, thereby allowing the ride to be shut down when the child got out of the ride. And that would have happened with both adequate supervision and modernization. Ergo: Playland’s fault.

The practice of some communities allowing their police and firefighters to base their pension on their last-year salary, rather than an average of their last three or five years, has stoked anger among readers. The pensions are gaining attention because the municipalities in which they are offered are scrambling to find money to cover the agreements. Readers are outraged at the politicians who entered into the agreements and at the unions, who they accuse of plundering the wallets of average taxpayers who don’t enjoy anywhere near the same benefits, if they even receive a pension at all.

Read the story, including two databases, here; then tell us what you think.

The shame is the ones approving these rip-offs. How many people in the private sector receive a pension anywhere near this. … Out of control. How many people even have a pension left?

Anyone posting a comment in protest of this pension benefit should have to be willing to enter just one burning building just one time to save someone else’s life. Most aren’t willing to do it even once. What price do you think is fair for repeatedly risking one’s own life and health to save the lives of others? Shame on you.

This is a slap in the face to the taxpayer during these hard economic times when we are all supposed to tighten our belts. Congress, the President and the unions will destroy the American economy, inflation and extraordinarily high taxes will follow and the dollar you and I have saved will be worth zilch.

Stop complaining. If you want that type of retirement benefit, than sign up for your local police or fire test. Corporate America always turned their noses up at cops and fireman, and everyone wants to be one now that times are tough in the financial world. … They deserve everything they get and more!

There are so many reasons to be mad about the $165 million in bonuses paid to the AIG executives who ran the financial division that turned our economy into one big shell game (which cup was all that money under, anyway?). Start with the lack of regulation, move on to the haste with which the initial bailout was foisted upon us, and then the follow-up bail out—all of them are enough to make the blood boil. Then, too, you can be mad about the wreckage those way-too-high-stakes poker players brought upon the rest of us: the lost jobs, the foreclosed homes, the downsizing of our dreams. Finally, the audacity of AIG to provide, and the employees themselves to accept, retention bonuses with the money the government provided to save their company—that’s just too much to bear.  Besides, why would any company want to retain the brainiacs who perpetrated the credit default swap felony upon us?

So anger is clearly the emotion of the moment and deservedly so. But the response from Congress is scary. The house just passed a bill that would impose a 90 percent tax on the bonus money. This amounts to re-writing the tax code for the purpose of punishment, doesn’t it?

That would seem to have the potential to set a very bad precedent.  So, dear blog readers, what do you think? Are you for the bonus tax, or against it?

With the untimely death of the actress Natasha Richardson we are reminded yet again of the benefits of wearing a helmet. We’ve long become accustomed to the idea that when skiers are racing or even just out for a day of vigorous skiing, that helmets are necessary. But who thinks they are going to face danger when just out for a lesson, with an instructor, on a bunny slope? That’s a surprise.  Even more shocking is learning that you could suffer a life threatening injury and be so unaware of the danger that you get up and make a joke about how clumsy you are, as Richardson is said to have done. 

So there are two lessons here I know I’ll never forget: helmets any time you are on skis or a bicycle and take every head injury seriously enough to be checked out by a doctor, immediately.  Sorry it had to take the loss of a talented actress and young mother to bring that lesson home.