Levittown's (Brief) Murder History

Levittown has the well-earned reputation for being a safe community and that reputation existed long before William Levitt came to town. Nevertheless, in the 'human nature being what it is' category, we have had people in our history who were less than enthusiastic about "Thou shalt not kill" in the King James' version.  

One day in the middle of the Great Depression, a passerby chanced upon the body of one John "Irish Jack" Sheridan in a field off Newbridge Road not far from Hempstead Turnpike. The unfortunate "Irish Jack", 62, had evidently died of a heart attack. What makes this so eerie is not the how or why, but the where. Sheridan heard the breathless flutter of angel's wings at exactly the same spot where a murder victim named William Gilbride had been found just a few years earlier.    

One of our earliest murders dates back to the early 19th Century. On September 11, 1808, Benjamin Tuan of Jerusalem (as the south Levittown/north Wantagh area was called back then) was hanged for beating a fellow laborer, Adam Gordon, to death with a garden hoe. And on a cold January 15, 1875, Lewis Jarvis and Elbert Jackson of Jerusalem swung for the June 27, 1873 killing of Samuel L. Jones of South Oyster Bay (now Massapequa).    

The Queens County Courthouse - for this area was part of Queens County until the 1898 Act of Consolidation created Nassau - had its gallows at the corner of Jericho Turnpike and Herricks Road. Both men, thereafter, were returned the Jerusalem at the cemetery at Oakfield Avenue in Wantagh which, at the time, was a Negro burying ground administered by the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.

Want to learn more about the history of Levittown and the surrounding communities? Visit levittownhistoricalsociety.org.