45°
Joseph W. Powers, 28, Suffern is charged with aggravated assault on a police officer, eluding and having drug paraphernalia in his car.
His passenger, 28-year-old ex-convict Edward Ceus, from Spring Valley, was ordered held on $20,000 bail, charged with having works for shooting heroin.
Police in Rockland County are also issuing detainers on both men in connection with arrest warrants there.
Both men were brought into the Bergen County Jail around noon.
It was a long night for Port Authority police following last night’s 5 o’clock crash.
Dogs couldn’t be used to search the car because police found the needles and syringes, which could have endangered them, the PAPD’s Al Della Fave told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
Using the necessary equipment, they painstakingly searched the car themselves, he said.
Powers and Ceus apparently had come from Washington Heights, and Powers was “pretty high on something” when a PAPD officer activiated his lights and sirens to try stopping the maroon Acura during rush-hour traffic on the George Washington Bridge, Della Fave said.
When the officer pulled his cruiser alongside to make his intentions clear, he said, the Acura sideswiped it.
The car barreled its way south on Lemoine Avenue through thick traffic before smashing into a PAPD cruiser headed toward the scene, Della Fave told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
The authority officer behind the wheel in the head-on crash was treated at Englewood Hospital, he said.
Powers, meanwhile, “had track marks on his arms and was obviously under the influence of something,” Della Fave told the PILOT.
Ceus was released last April after serving nearly four years in a New York state prison on a grand larceny conviction, records show.
He also has several New Jersey convictions on his record — out of Montvale, Mahwah and elsewhere — for speeding and pot possession, among other counts.
Powers, meanwhile, spent seven months behind bars for a drug conviction in Rockland, records show.
{loadposition log}
Click here to follow Daily Voice Fort Lee and receive free news updates.
