Sunday Briefing: Fugitive Teacher in Colombia, NRPD Officer Resigns, Third Suspect Charged in Easter BBQ Shooting

Robert Cox

13 Apr 2026 — 5 min read

Downtown New Rochelle (from IdeallyYours)

This briefing draws from reporting at Talk of the Sound, analysis and commentary published in Words in Edgewise, and selected regional coverage for the week ending April 12, 2026

A Note from the Publisher

I did not have breaking news out of Latin America, from my home in Europe, about a story in North America, on my bingo card this past week.

Former New Rochelle teacher Samuel McVey was detained in the Medellín area and reportedly deported from Colombia following multiple incidents near schools. McVey, who faces charges tied to threats against the New Rochelle school superintendent, had previously failed to appear in court and is subject to active warrants. I was contacted by a security firm in Medellín, and we exchanged information. I published a story Thursday that added yet another bizarre twist to an already bizarre case. I have not even reported on the Paterson, New Jersey angle.

McVey called me Friday. After the obligatory threats and posturing — he claimed to have contacts in the IRA — he said he disputed aspects of the reporting and offered his own version of events following his detention and expulsion. He spoke quickly, used Spanish pronunciations, and referenced people, places, and organizations unfamiliar to me. It took many hours to sort that and verify details — for example, identifying a mall he says he was at, near a particular school, that includes a Brazilian jiu-jitsu gym, a fitness center, a dollar store, and a full Bancolombia branch — and then mapping and linking each location. Lots of needles amid lots of haystacks.

There are numerous contradictions between his account, social media posts from Colombia, and statements by local officials, and some of it is contradicted by New Rochelle police. It is a jumble not fully sorted. I have a major story out of Colombia that I expect to publish within the next 24 hours, that will add new and more concerning elements in the McVey saga.

McVey says he is in the United States.

Wherever he is, he can now expect additional charges, including contempt of court. The most absurd aspect of the case is that even if he were to appear in court Monday in New Rochelle — despite having said he would never return — he would likely be released within minutes given the nature of the charges, vacating the bench warrant,,and his lack of a prior criminal record. In recent days, a woman accused of stabbing her boyfriend in downtown New Rochelle was released on her own recognizance, and two suspects arrested in the Heritage Homes shooting were also released. The legal threshold for remand without bail is high, and bail is unlikely to be set at all in his case. New Rochelle police have said they do not extradite on misdemeanor charges, meaning he need only remain outside New York to avoid facing the pending charges related to threats against local school officials.

The week started with the shootout in New Rochelle at the Heritage Homes Corral: five shooters, with two in custody (including a now-former city employee), one in New Jersey awaiting extradition and two on the run.

I took strong exception to a parasitic website promoting beer day and coffee day who cannibalized my article on the Robert Wooten case.

And now a nerd update. Over the past week, I’ve been tuning up one of the quieter but more important pieces of the Talk of the Sound publishing system — the pipeline that moves links, headlines, and source attribution from discovery to distribution. At the center of that workflow is Pinboard, which I use as a structured intake layer: every story I flag is tagged, categorized, and pushed into a custom RSS feed that powers the homepage, feeds Nextdoor, and drives other automated distribution in the background.

The primary interface for that entire system is an iOS app called Pinstachio. It’s the tool I use dozens of times a day to capture links via the iOS share sheet, to assign tags, post to Pinboard, and effectively “program” how each item will behave downstream — which category it lands in, whether it’s treated as original reporting or an external source, and even which branded image tile appears when it’s surfaced on platforms like Nextdoor.

What began as a simple effort to expand that system — adding a set of media outlet logo tiles so readers can quickly distinguish Talk of the Sound reporting from external sources — quickly turned into a deeper round of infrastructure work. Fixing that one layer exposed a series of dependencies: tag consistency, RSS behavior, WordPress category mapping, and how the share extension handles newly created tags. The result was a week of what I would generously describe as light systems engineering — debugging PHP, adjusting JavaScript behavior, and refining a custom plugin that maps Pinboard tags to WordPress categories — all to make sure the output looks simple and clean on the front end.

That’s where Pinstachio became critical. Because it sits at the very top of the workflow, any inconsistency there — especially around tag availability in the share sheet — propagates through the entire system. I reached out to the developer, Frank, with a detailed breakdown of the issue. He immediately understood the problem, implemented a fix, and added a new option to allow the share extension to fetch the latest tags directly. He also addressed a separate issue with the “private” toggle not persisting between saves — a subtle bug that could prevent items from appearing in RSS feeds at all.

Those changes are now live in version 2.2 of Pinstachio, which was approved by Apple this week. I left a well-deserved five-star review in the App Store — “Excellent Developer Responsiveness and Thoughtful Improvements” — which, in this case, is simply an accurate description of what happened. It’s a good example of how these systems actually evolve — not as abstract software, but as tools shaped in real time by how they’re used.

Eliot Engel passed.

Below is this week’s structured briefing.