The sister of Jason Lang, as promised, has announced a date for a protest against bath salts. It will take place in front of 420 Emporium, 400 Ellicott St., Batavia.

The protest, Brandi Smith said, is set for 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., Wednesday, July 18.

"We're asking anyone who would like to join us to please meet at the location," Smith said. "This protest is against the sale and use of bath salts. I have seen bath salts ruin lives, families, people have died, and the bizarre actions of people using bath salts puts everyone in the community in danger."

On Tuesday, Smith's mother Nicole Lang confronted store employees because she believes 420 Emporium has been selling bath salts to her son, Jason Lang.

A store employee told police that Lang entered the store that night "and began yelling and screaming ‘You’re selling bath salts and killing my son.' "

At the scene -- Nicole Lang was cited for alleged trespass -- Lang and Smith vowed to mount a protest against the store.

"I'm sending out a plea to the whole community to please give a little of your time to participate in the protest," Smith said last night. "I feel this is an emergency situation that needs immediate attention. My hope is people will become more aware to this nightmarish situation."

Jason Lang is the former owner of The Laughing Buddha, a tattoo parlor and head shop on Ellicott Avenue. Smith worked for a time as manager of the shop.

While Lang has admitted to selling synthetic marijuana in the past, he's always denied selling bath salts.

The bath salt issue, however, has recently hit the Lang family hard. Jason Lang has been arrested for allegedly calling the landlord of 420 Emporium and impersonating law enforcement, trying to convince the landlord not to rent to the Brockport-based business, allegedly warning the property owner that the retail chain sells bath salts.

In recent weeks, Lang has reportedly made several 9-1-1 calls and was arrested July 1 for allegedly falsely reporting hearing gunshots at a local hotel.

The mother of Lang's child, Ashley Keene, is accused of giving bath salts to a 14-year-old girl. According to the girl's statement to police, Lang and Keene drove to the 420 Emporium location in Warsaw to buy two packages of "Amped," a brand of bath salt, on Memorial Day.

City Manager Jason Molino said the planned protest might be an appropriate neighborhood response.

"If that's what's going on inside that establishment, and if the neighborhood is fed up, it's certainly within their right to do that," Molino said.

The Batavian called the 420 Emporium in Batavia today to get reaction from the store manager to the planned protest, but he wasn't available for comment.

Besides Brockport, Batavia and Warsaw, 420 Emporium operates stores in Rochester, Syracuse and Fulton.

The photo above was taken Thursday morning. Up until at least Wednesday afternoon, the store had its business name painted in the windows of the shop.  Employees have apparently removed the name of the business from the window.

Even if people can't come out on Wednesday, Smith asked people to pray about the bath salt issue.

"As a Christian and a member of the Batavia Assembly of God, I urge people to pray for any and all who have been affected by bath salts," Smith said. "Jesus is love. Bath salts are evil."

For more information on Smith's plans or to help in organizing the protest, contact her at 585-300-7790.

Eric Betz says he and a lot of his friends are pretty unhappy with what they're seeing in Batavia right now.

Betz wants to do something about it: raise awareness of the dangers of bath salts and send a message that not everybody who enjoys an alternative lifestyle approves of this behavior.

"We don't want people who enjoy their freedom of expression to be equated to these scumbags," Betz said.

He's working on organizing a community event sometime soon that he hopes will bring the community together to rally against bath salts.

He said a few local businesses, such as Bourbon & Burger, Foxprowl Collectables and CPR Computer, have signed on to support the event. Next he wants to talk to the City of Batavia to get permission to hold the event in Austin Park. 

He's also looking for a donation of a car that people can take a whack at with a sledge hammer as a "your brain on bath salts" message.

At $5 a hammer swing, Betz is hoping to raise money for GCASA or another substance abuse program.

Betz, manager and a tattoo artist for Affliction Ink, 440 Ellicott St., Batavia, said "almost every one of my clients is against this crap."

Affliction Ink is owned by Eric Weiss. Both Weiss and Betz are former employees of The Laughing Buddha (440 Ellicott is the Buddha's original location) who left their jobs there, Betz said, because they were concerned about Jason Lang allegedly selling synthetic marijuana. 

Now they're just down the street from 420 Emporium (located at 400 Ellicott St.), which Betz believes has sold bath salts, and he said if they were or are, it's bad for the neighborhood.

People sometimes confuse the two businesses, he said, and he wants to make the distinction clear. Affliction Ink has nothing to do with bath salts, he said, though some people still come into the store looking to buy packages of the narcotic.

"It's getting out of hand," Betz said. "We see people walk by every day high on this stuff. It's disgusting."

One of the big dangers of bath salts, Betz said, is that it makes people paranoid and they might act irrationally, making them a danger not just to themselves but anybody in the community.

"We want to raise awareness about it," Betz said. "I'm tired of hearing people saying they want to leave Batavia because of it. This is my home. I love it here."

Rich Clark of CPR Computers has set up a Facebook page for the planned event, "Let's Beat Bath Salts."

UPDATE: The event is scheduled for 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., July 28, at L&L Transmission, 8781 Alexander Road, Batavia.  Additional businesses supporting the event: Neptunes Gardens Pet Shop, Rochester Metal Booking, B-Town Yellow Taxi, My T-Shirts Etc.  Also, I'm told I got Eric's profession wrong. He does piercings for Affliction Ink.

This morning city employee Colton Cole was watering the city's hosta garden outside of City Centre.

An Alabama resident is accused of driving drunk and randomly firing a rifle at homes and cars on the Tonawanda Indian Reservation on Tuesday night.

Eric A. Easton, 28, of Ham Road, Alabama, is charged with two counts of reckless endangerment, 1st, a Class D felony.

He was jailed on $100,000 bail.

On Tuesday in the late evening, deputies responded to Basom for reports of shots being fired at homes and cars.

The alleged victims appeared to be randomly selected and no injuries were reported, though property was damaged.

Easton was taken into custody late Tuesday night by Erie County deputies and was arraigned in the Town of Newstead on Thursday. Following his arraignment, he was released from Erie County custody and immediately arrested by a Genesee County deputy.

The investigation is continuing in Erie, Niagara and Genesee counties and additional charged are likely, according to the Sheriff's Office.

Andrew J. Ashley, 25, of 91 W. Main St., Le Roy, is charged with DWI, driving with a BAC of .08 or greater and using a mobile phone while driving. According to Le Roy PD, Ashley was driving on Route 19 and allegedly texting while driving when he failed to negotiate a curve at Route 19 and Wolcott Street. Ashley's vehicle struck a curb and the vehicle's axle broke.

Danielle Marie Stevens, 35, of Ford Road, Elba, is charged with criminal trespass, 2nd. Stevens was arrested on a warrant by State Police following a traffic stop. Stevens was turned over to the Sheriff's Office, arraigned and jailed on $1,250 bail.

Rebecca Louise Batt, 31, of East Bethany Le Roy Road, Bethany, is charged with DWI and driving with a BAC of .18 or greater. Batt was arrested following a trespassing complaint at 1:48 a.m., Thursday, when Batt allegedly drove her vehicle into the back yard of a residence on East Bethany Le Roy Road and parked without permission of the homeowner.

Wendy L. Mucher, 42, of Lewiston Road, Batavia, is charged with petit larceny and criminal mischief. Mucher is accused of stealing $29.34 worth of merchandise that she removed from its packaging from a business on Veterans Memorial Drive.

Joseph Daniel Barone, 30, of Woodbriar Drive, Rochester, is charged with criminal possession of a controlled substance, 7th, and unlawful possession of marijuana. Barone was stopped at 8:38 p.m. Thursday on Route 77 in Pembroke by Deputy Patrick Reeves. A search of the vehicle allegedly found alcohol, crack cocaine and marijuana.

Melissa Ann Neely, 42, of Lincoln Mills Road, East Rochester, is charged with controlled substance not its original container. Neely was charged following a traffic stop at 9:09 p.m. Thursday on Route 77, Pembroke, by Deputy Patrick Reeves.

Jacob D. Waite, 20, of 3661 Pike Road, Batavia, is charged with DWI, driving with a BAC of .08 or greater and driving left of pavement markings. Waite was arrested by Attica PD following a traffic stop at 11:45 p.m. Wednesday on Market Street, Attica.

The new LCD-based sign, replacing the old neon sign, atop Batavia Downs was illuminated for the first time Thursday evening.

A dog is reportedly locked in a black four-door sedan -- "with minimal air" -- in the parking lot of Walmart, near the food entrance. At 6 p.m., the temperature was 88, according to dispatch. Law enforcement is responding.

City police are responding to an address on Burke Drive after it was reported that a young female, approximately 20 years old, was in the area soliciting free vacuuming service. A white vehicle, unfamiliar to the caller, was reported to be parked on the street, however it is now gone.

A fight was reported not long ago in the parking lot of the Creekside Manor Apartments, located at 61 Myrtle St. in the Village of Le Roy. When police arrived, they found nothing. A caller told dispatch he was going outside with a crowbar but was told to remain inside. Now, two ambulances are called to the address, to the last building on the right. One person has trouble breathing, but it's not clear why the other medic is needed.

A field fire is reported at 4271 Drake St. Road in Elba. Elba Fire Department is responding. The location is between South Main Street and Weatherwax Road. Fire equipment from the towns of Oakfield, Batavia and Byron are also requested.

UPDATE 4:11 p.m.: Drake Street Road and Weatherwax are being shut down.

UPDATE 4:16 p.m.: Fire police are stationed at routes 262 and 98. A Bergen tanker is requested to fill in at Byron's hall. The wind is 10 mph out of the east.

UPDATE 5:01 p.m.: Batavia and Oakfield are back in service.

UPDATE 5:06 p.m.: The fire is out. Elba, Byron and Bergen are back in service. The roadway is reopened.

Press release:

On Saturday, July 28, the Town of Batavia Fire Department will hold its 13th Annual Harley-Davidson Fat Boy Raffle. (The model is a 2012 FLSTFB.)

The event runs from 8 p.m. until midnight -- rain or shine. It will feature a beer tent and live entertainment by the band 7th Heaven. Food and refreshments will be available for purchase from Alex’s Place.

The event is free admission and open to the public, a ticket purchase is not necessary to attend. Tickets are limited to 2,500 and the money raised benefits the town fire department. Each ticket costs $20 and they are still available, sold on a first-come-first-serve basis. 

This year we are offering a $10,000 cash prize in lieu of the motorcycle to the Grand Prize winner. They will have the option of the bike or the cash prize.

To buy a ticket, checks and money orders can be made out to the “Town of Batavia Fire Dept. Raffle” and mailed to:

C/O Raffle Chairman
Town of Batavia Fire Dept.
P.O. Box 417
Batavia, NY 14021-0417

For further information please visit: <http://townofbataviafire.com>, call 344-3284, ext. 12, or email tbfdraffle@townofbataviafire.com

Law enforcement is searching for a white male wearing a white tank top who is suspected of stealing a cartload of items from Tops Market in Le Roy. He allegedly left the store with the cart and then went across the street to the Dollar General store.

He is said to have gone in back of Dollar General and when spotted by employees, he abandoned the shopping cart and fled on foot eastbound "toward the bridge." Officers are still scouring the area but have yet to locate him.

UPDATE 1:43 p.m.: The suspect is believed to be about 16 or 17 years old.

UPDATE 2:05 p.m.: Police think it is possible that the suspect had a partner in crime, possibly driving a vehicle. That's because the loot was bulky -- "13 or 14 cases, give or take, of Red Bull."

UPDATE 2:42 p.m.: After speaking with a person who saw the suspect, he is further described as being "very thin" and clean cut, a veritable military-style cut, and wearing full-length blue jeans. Officers found a standard white shirt abandoned along with the Red Bull, thus he might have originally worn that over the tank top he was last spotted in.

A dog has been locked inside a white Ford Chevy Equinox for at least 10 minutes in the parking lot of Target in Batavia. A Sheriff's deputy is responding.

The vehicle is registered to a person in Darien.

Sheep on the lam have been discovered and officers are working diligently to corral their woolly quarry, located at 1833 Genesee St., between Ellenwood and Colby roads in Pembroke.

But it seems some of them do not want to go gentle into this good afternoon, nor quietly.

"You got a lasso or rope? This one's not going to go willingly," says an officer.

It is decided that a lasso would be employed.

UPDATE 12:57 p.m.: A ewe has been spotted by a hedgerow. "She's stopped running. I think she's too hot." And the officer is hot on her heels.

UPDATE 1:04 p.m.: "I'm still looking for an owner. I've went east, and haven't found anyone to the west yet." The deputy says that after checking four houses east of the location and three thus far to the west, he is heading now toward West Batavia to continue the search.

UPDATE 1:11 p.m.: "The unknown is in a hedgerow in the woods. It's unable to be caught. So I don't know what they are going to do," reports a deputy, who then went back in service. There is reportedly a sheep farm in the vicinity, off of Route 5, and deputies are heading there. The search continues.

UPDATE 2:24 p.m.: Deputies are returning to Genesee Street after locating the possible owner -- in Corfu -- who is also going along to determine if the sheep are his.

UPDATE 2:51 p.m.: "The sheep caper has been completed," a deputy tells the Genesee County Emergency Dispatch Center. The stocky, hooved mammals are grudgingly going right back where they came from -- to property owned by a fencing company (we can't make this stuff up) located "off Route 77, south of the viaduct." It's Bellevue Farms. (It would not be surprising if the owner scolded them -- futilely of course -- for being very BAAAD.)

In California, I didn't see many asphalt driveways. For whatever reason, most homeowners there prefer concrete (weather, I imagine, is a factor).

It didn't take long after moving to Western New York to figure out that here asphalt is the preferred surface for driveways, and if you're a homeowner who takes routine maintenance seriously, you periodically get your driveway sealed.

A couple of years ago I suggested to Scott Kopper, owner of WNY Blacktop Sealers, that I come out to one of his jobs some time and take a few pictures and learn a little bit about why sealing an asphalt driveway is important. This morning, we actually finally got together for one of his jobs.

Here's what he told me: "A blacktop drive way is a big investment and you want to protect that investment. What blacktop sealing does, not only does it look good, but it makes your driveway more resistant to oil, gas leaks, power steering fluid, and it doesn't oxidize as quickly from the sun beating on it, which means it doesn't crack and break as easily. "

I was surprised to learn the sun does more damage to asphalt than winter salt and snow. Winter damage occurs when a driveway does crack and then ice gets into those cracks, expands and makes them worse.

Josh Dibble was helping Scott this morning at a residence on Vine Street.

Batavia Little League played a championship game at MacArthur Park on Wednesday. When I left, Batavia was ahead 7-1 or 8-1, but I've not yet received final results from anybody. Evan so, here are photos from yesterday's game.

UPDATE: Batavia won 9-4 and now advances to a sectionals round, which is hosted in Batavia this weekend. Teams in the tournament besides Batavia: Penfield, Auburn, Fredonia, Portville and Orchard Park.

Up until Friday, Melissa Broadbent thought her brother Bradley was really turning his life around.

He had a job, he was trying to do the best he could by his son, within the limits of court orders and the demands of the child's mother.

Then, seemingly overnight, and just three months removed from his last prison term, Bradley Broadbent discovered "Amped," a form of bath salts that is reportedly sold at a shop in Batavia.

"Previous to that day, he was doing well for himself," Melissa said. "He worked in a flower shop, he gained better employment, he was trying to become a good member of society."

Last Friday, Bradley thrust himself into local headlines when he climbed atop the roof of a home on Hutchins Street and then began jumping from roof to roof, yelling something about the police being after him.

He was taken by Mercy EMS to UMMC for evaluation, but that night, Bradley reportedly fled the hospital and went to his ex-wife's house on Tracy Avenue and entered her home.

That action led to a charge of burglary in the second degree.

"I don't believe anybody should be selling it," Melissa said. "For some people it’s a high, but for other people something doesn’t quite click and it’s not safe to us and the rest of the world."

If convicted of the burglary charge, it would be Bradley's third strike and mean from 20 years to life in prison.

And that's what has Melissa Broadbent most concerned.

She thinks the system has failed her brother. And the failure of the system, she said, was never more apparent than it was on Friday.

Melissa said when she came across Bradley that morning, she could tell he was high and learned from a friend that he had allegedly ingested bath salts, a substance for which she had no real prior knowledge.

She said she tried contacting her brother's parole officer, but he was on vacation and nobody from the parole office "bothered," as she put it, to call her back.

A call back and an effort to pick him up might have meant the entire Friday would have gone completely different for her brother, she said.

Then, after her brother was taken to UMMC, Melissa wonders why he was lightly restrained at the hospital. Melissa believes he should have been shackled by handcuffs so he couldn't escape until he came down off his high.

Then there's the issue of the burglary charge for entering his ex-wife's home.

"She was leaving a key in the mailbox for him," Broadbent said. "How was he supposed to know he wasn’t supposed to come in that day?"

Now that Melissa has gotten a quick personal and Google-search lesson in bath salts, she is perplexed why the substance is so easily available in Batavia and why anybody in good conscience would sell the substance to another human being.

"There's a chemical in it, a specific chemical, that makes you come out of your element and makes you do things you would not normally do," Melissa said. "It is not safe, not for anybody, not for the person doing it and nor for the person walking down the street.

"There's no way to test for it. People who want to find a mental escape, they're going to do it because it's legal and it's so easy to get. It needs to come off the street before somebody dies."

Bradley Broadbent was first arrested, she said, on a robbery charge when he was 16. He and a partner stole one dollar from a store and Broadbent spent eight years in prison.

When he came out, Melissa said, he was a changed person. He was anti-social, didn't know how to interact with people, distrusted everyone and was hostile to people he met for the first time.

The family wanted to help him, they said, so in the hope of getting him into treatment, they provided information to law enforcement that led to his arrest.  Rather than receiving treatment, however, she said Broadbent was sent back to prison.

"That didn't help him at all," she said. "That made him worse."

Now, with a possible third strike, Melissa is worried the system will once again come down hard on him and send him to prison for the rest of his life.

She hopes, somehow, someway, the system will do better than that by her brother.

"He is in need of mental care," Melissa said. "We know him. The people who know him, know he needs that. The system doesn’t know him. They don’t know he needs that and the system doesn’t care. That’s what I would like to see happen. My brother needs mental care. He needs help mentally. He doesn't know how to handle himself emotionally or mentally."

She isn't of a mind to sugarcoat any of the things Bradley has been accused of doing in the past. She just wants the best outcome for her brother.

"I don’t defend anything my brother has ever done," she said. "If he’s wrong, he’s wrong."

The rapid lessons in bath salts has made her very afraid of what the presence of the substance means for Batavia. She's worried -- more certain -- that not enough will be done soon enough about bath salts.

"It seems nothing ever gets done until it's the absolute worst and then people open their eyes and do something," she said.

Nicole Lang, the mother of another person whose life is allegedly being harmed by bath salts has said she's ready to set up a picket and a protest of a local shop allegedly selling the now controlled substance.

"I’m with her," Melissa said. "I’m all with her. The people selling this stuff, they’re not dealing with the consequences. Yet the people who love their family are the people who have been tainted by the effects of it."