East Camden

  A female squatter set fire to a vacant Camden warehouse Tuesday night following a lovers' quarrel, according to authorities. But officials do not believe she played a role in other recent warehouse fires in the city. Tammie Shipp, 35, was charged Wednesday evening with aggravated arson in connection with the two-alarm blaze at a former paint manufacturing plant at Sixth Street and Carl Miller Boulevard in Camden's Waterfront South section. Shipp, who had set up living quarters at the warehouse -- vacant since 1996, when Clement Coverall Co. stopped operating –– is accused of using a lit cigarette to ignite paper under a mattress following a dispute with her boyfriend, who was present at the time.

Teenagers from Camden and Pennsauken hit the rails and ramps with their skateboards following the opening Friday of the Stockton Station Park and greenway project, a $10 million recreation area at the Catto Demonstration Project in East Camden. In addition to a fenced-in skateboarding area, the park - on north end of Rosedale Avenue, off Westfield Avenue - got a synthetic-turf multipurpose field, basketball courts, a baseball field, and chess tables. The park was funded through grants from the state Schools Development Authority and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection's Green Acres program.

Greg Rawls was asleep on the floor of a friend's home early Wednesday when a loud banging broke the silence. His girlfriend, who had been lying next to him, opened the door, and members of the U.S. Marshals New York/New Jersey Fugitive Task Force poured in. Roughly 36 hours after authorities say Rawls opened fire on an East Camden corner, missing his target but sending a bullet into 9-year-old Jorge Cartagena's temple - a wound doctors say...

A Camden County man was arrested this morning and charged in the shooting that seriously wounded a 9-year-old East Camden boy and is expected to leave him blind, authorities said. Greg Rawls, 29, was taken into custody at 1:45 a.m. at a home in Winslow, police said. He is charged with aggravated assault. Members of the U.S. Marshals New York/New Jersey Fugitive Task force had tracked Rawls to a girlfriend's home on Langdon Court. He is being held at the Camden County Jail.

He had been playing basketball in East Camden and was walking home Monday afternoon when the bullets started flying. Jorge Cartagena, a fourth grader, was struck in the eye, collapsed to the ground, and immediately called out for his mother. "Where is my son? Where is my son?" screamed his mother, Isabel, after learning from a neighbor of the 9-year-old's shooting. She rushed from her home on Marlton Avenue toward the shooting scene. She cradled him in her lap and told him "to be strong.

The third fire in a vacant building in Camden in less than a week heavily damaged a three-story rowhouse Tuesday and displaced a couple and their three children living in a neighboring home. The two-alarm blaze on the 100 block of North 34th Street started around 12:50 p.m. and was placed under control in a little more than an hour, said Fire Chief Michael Harper. A neighboring home, where Alfredo Llorens and his family lived, sustained smoke and water damage, Harper said. Squatters often frequented the home, which had been vacant long before the family began renting the neighboring home eight months ago, Llorens and residents said.

The lady who brands herself the Diva of Do Right really, really doesn't want to go there. "I wish I could ignore Anthony Weiner," Phyllis Kae says with a sigh, pondering that congressional tweeter with the heater. "But I honestly believe I have something important to say. "I don't care what he has in his pants!" An ethics consultant, private investigator, and bail-bondswoman based in Camden, Kae, 65, has plenty more to say. She just published a book ( Wanted: Everyday Ethics )

Agnes Klein Lieberman, 83, a Holocaust survivor who operated the Cherry Hill Kosher Market for 30 years, died of heart failure Tuesday, March 1, at her daughter's home in Vineland, N.J. Mrs. Lieberman, her parents, and three siblings were taken from their home in Hungary by German soldiers during World War II. In 1990, she shared with an Inquirer reporter the terror and anguish she felt when her mother and father were taken to their death. She recalled spending time at concentration camps, including Auschwitz, where she witnessed unthinkable events as a teenager.

Becoming pastor of St. Joseph's Pro-Cathedral in East Camden was like a homecoming for Msgr. Robert McDermott, who grew up on nearby Carman Street and "knew the neighborhood like the back of my hand. " That was in the 1950s. When he returned in 1985, McDermott says, "I was astounded by the number of abandoned homes. " That's why he founded the St. Joseph's Carpenter Society, a widely respected nonprofit that will celebrate its 25th anniversary in December. Starting with a single home on North 28th Street that it bought from the federal government for $4,610, the society has renovated or built 800 houses.

Early Wednesday, the former Holmes Lounge & Garden was a drab wood-frame and stucco building on North 27th Street in East Camden. Its mirrored bar and covered patio - where customers including Patti LaBelle, Allen Iverson, and Boyz II Men once enjoyed smooth jazz and hard crabs - were idle. That changed with the arrival of more than 100 volunteers from corporate and nonprofit groups who gave the former popular restaurant a makeover - and a new purpose. Whirring saws, hammers, and fresh paint quickly helped to transform the building into an early child-care and education center.