Donald Wittkowski

Brian Coggins says it is his way to honor military veterans for all of the sacrifices they have made in the service of their country. On Saturday, Nov. 11, Coggins will offer current and former members of the military free car washes at his Car Caress businesses in Ocean City and Marmora as part of a nationwide program on Veterans Day. “We’re just trying to give back. They’re the reason we’re here doing what we’re doing,” he said of the veterans...

Some details about the crash that claimed the life of their teenage cousin about 20 years ago have faded over time, but there is one thing that Alan and Lisa Carpenter will never forget. “He was a passenger with a drunken driver. That’s how he was killed,” Lisa Carpenter recalled of 16-year-old Ellis Mullen, who died in Greenville, Tenn...

No doubt they’ll be squeezing out gobs of toothpaste at the Morton house. Brothers Wesley and Parker Morton looked inside their Halloween candy bags and smiled at all the goodies they had collected Saturday while trick-or-treating in downtown Ocean City. “We have a lot of teeth-brushing to do tonight,” their mother, Victoria Morton, of Ocean City, said laughing...

The Ocean City Police Department may have invented an ironclad way to prevent crime. All it needs to do is to roll out its creepy Halloween float from time to time and criminals will surely be, as the saying goes, “scared straight.” This nightmare-on-wheels rumbled down Asbury Avenue on Thursday night, giving thousands of spectators lining the sidewalks for the city’s 70th annual Halloween parade a spine-tingling thrill...

A prominent local builder and a former top government official have been appointed to the board of the Ocean City Housing Authority in the latest move to restructure the agency following an embezzlement scandal involving its former chief executive. M. Sean Scarborough, a principal in the development company Scarborough Properties, and Mike Dattilo, who served as Ocean City’s business administrator before retiring in 2015, are expected to join the board in November...

Ocean City plans to use its power of eminent domain to acquire a key piece of property overlooking the main gateway into town, even though a real estate company wants to redevelop the same site into an office complex. City Council took the first step Tuesday night to acquire the high-profile site at the corner of Ninth Street and Bay Avenue by introducing an ordinance that would pay the property owner $650,000...

Help for Ocean City’s eroded beaches arrived Monday in the form of giant excavators, flat-bed tractor trailers, mountainous piles of pipe and workers wearing hard hats. Soon, they will be joined by a 305-foot dredge, named “Texas,” anchored about a mile offshore to pump fresh sand through pipes from the bottom of Great Egg Harbor Inlet onto the beaches at the barrier island’s northern tip...

Janine and Wilfredo Chevere and their five children took a long look at their checklist and began naming the types of trash they found on Ocean City’s beaches Saturday morning. One of their sons, Anteo, had just one word to describe it all: “Gross,” he said, frowning. There were discarded cigarette butts, paper food wrappers, plastic shopping bags, pieces of wood, soda and beer bottles and even some broken glass...

The Ocean City Housing Authority was forced to cancel its second straight monthly meeting because of vacancies on its board of commissioners, but help is on the way. The seven-member board is down to only four commissioners following the death of Ed Speitel in September and resignation of Portia Thompson. There is a third vacancy on the board because Gov. Chris Christie has not yet appointed his representative to the authority. The governor’s seat has been open for more than a year, and it is not yet clear when Christie intends to fill it, said Bob Barr, a city councilman who also serves as the housing authority’s chairman...

At low tide, Pam and Chris Pippett know that their 24-foot boat isn’t going anywhere because it is literally trapped in the mud at their bayfront home. They also know that once they get their boat out on the water, they have to head home within two hours of low tide or risk not being able to get back through the shallow lagoon. “That’s our boat slip – absolutely stuck in the mud,” Pam Pippett said while showing a cellphone photo of the lagoon, known as Carnival Bayou...