Roxborough

A Roxborough man accused of shaking to death his girlfriend's 3-year-old son because he would not stop crying can be released on $200,000 bail and electronically monitored house arrest, a Philadelphia judge ruled Thursday. Common Pleas Court Judge Benjamin Lerner set bail for Joseph Zysk on the motion of defense attorney Jack McMahon and over objections of Assistant District Attorney Beth McCaffery. McMahon argued that Zysk, 28, has no criminal record, was employed as a railroad lineman, and before his arrest lived in his mother's Roxborough house.

THE BUTLER and Clark families say that they're prisoners in their Roxborough homes, their lives a "living hell" on a horseshoe-shaped street of tidy, brick twins. They blame each other. The Butlers keep their blinds shut, their young son indoors. The Clarks erected a vinyl fence and have a pair of binoculars sitting on a table beneath their dining-room window. The red and blue lights from police cruisers often glow through their closed curtains on Voigt Road. It's as if chaos is embedded in the brick and mortar there, the devil's hooves dug deep into the patches of grass between their homes - and all the cops, mediators, bosses and lawyers can't seem to shake him loose.

For the last two weeks, the Roxborough Branch of the Free Library of Philadelphia has been closed - a victim of a broken air-conditioning system - leaving residents to seek other places to beat the heat, socialize, or check out a book. The air-conditioning stopped working May 25, and the city hopes to reopen the library Wednesday, said Sandy Horrocks, vice president of external affairs for the Free Library. It will cost $30,000 to repair the building's two compressors, which date to 1969, when the library opened.

WHEN IT comes to pierogie, I have been to the Mount - a Ukrainian Catholic church - where an octogenarian works her magic on this mixture of pasta dough and mashed potatoes. Hers are so light you wonder how they keep from floating off the plate. While there were once many church ladies supplying our city with pierogies, the tradition is dying, as younger generations don't have the time or the touch. Enter Marie Thorpe, owner of the Pierogie Kitchen in Roxborough. When she took over her aunt's ice cream stand about 10 years ago, Thorpe decided to keep the art of pierogie alive and began making them during Lent.

The sunglasses are not an attempt to look cool. Or even kool. For the next few days, however, Jeff O'Reilly might want to wear them nonstop, thus giving himself a better chance of fending off autograph hounds. Many guys are familiar with hitting home runs in Roxborough's cozy John Boyce Field, which is used by Roman Catholic High for baseball games. O'Reilly smacked one yesterday, in fact, and it raised his high school career total, both the field and overall variety, to two. Ah, but the 6-2, 235-pound righthander, a senior at Cardinal O'Hara, also pitched five innings of no-hit ball and wound up allowing two safeties while - drum roll, please - posting a 4-0 Catholic Red shutout.

William H. "Big Daddy" Murphy, 84, a congenial tavern owner and longtime basketball officiator, died of heart failure Friday, March 18, at home in Roxborough. Mr. Murphy purchased a bar in Roxborough in 1968, and Murphy's Tavern became a popular gathering place for neighbors and sports figures, including former Dodgers manager Tony Lasorda and high school and college basketball coach Speedy Morris. Don Tollefson, who hosts a pregame TV show for the Eagles, discovered the bar in 1975 soon after moving from California to Philadelphia to be a reporter for WPVI-TV.

RASHAWN Anderson's high-school basketball jersey, No. 12, was draped over an empty chair. It was 4 p.m. yesterday, 17 hours after Anderson, or "Shawnee" as his friends called him, was gunned down less than 300 feet from where he lived at Abbottsford Homes, in East Falls. And now his team, the Roxborough Indians, were about to begin their first-round Public League Division B playoff match against Southern without Anderson. The team's star. The team's heart. "The kids wanted to play," said Roxborough coach Terrell Burnett.

Lijha Lewis said he had no doubt that Rashawn Anderson was looking down on him and his Roxborough teammates as they battled host Southern in a Public League basketball playoff Tuesday afternoon, less than 24 hours after Anderson was shot multiple times in the head and killed in East Falls. "He was here with us, for sure," said Lewis, a senior forward for the Indians. "I know he would have been proud of how we played and battled in his memory. This was for him. " With Lewis netting a game-high 24 points, the 10th-place Indians outlasted the seventh-place Rams, 55-53, in overtime in a Class AAA contest.

Shortly after he was arrested on charges of killing his girlfriend's 3-year-old son, Joseph Zysk broke down in tears and admitted to police that he had grown frustrated when the boy wouldn't stop crying, and that he had "thumped" the child several times on the side of his body with his fist. In a police statement that was read during a hearing in Common Pleas Court on Wednesday, Zysk, 27, told investigators, "I didn't mean to hurt him. " The "thumps" inflicted on Jason Larkin tore a hole in the boy's liver, according to the medical examiner, causing massive internal bleeding that ended the child's life less than two hours later.

All police knew about the murdered teen whose body was dumped in Germantown a week ago today was written on his shirt: Roxborough High School. With no identification on him, police went to the school the next morning and pored over the absentee list, looking for a missing student who matched the description of their victim, sources said. Meanwhile, Patsy Foster had spent the night calling her son, Christopher, then all morning calling hospitals after he didn't return from a quick trip to a sandwich shop with a friend.