>> From NJ PBS studios, this is NJ Spotlight News with Briana Vannozzi.

>> Hello and thanks for joining us tonight.

I'm Joanna Gagis.

Briana Vannozzi's off.

Coming up, from extreme weather to rising costs and cyclospora concerns, New Jersey's farmers have had a rough few months.

We'll talk with one farmer about how they're managing their crops through all the uncertainty.

And later, New Jerseyans speak out about the most important issues of the day, whether we should pump our own gas, have alcohol in movie theaters, or get a tax break for having pets.

But first, the family of Victoria Lee has filed a wrongful death lawsuit.

25-year-old Lee was shot and killed by police during a mental health crisis response in 2024.

We'll talk to her family's attorney about the case.

That's next.

Funding for NJ Spotlight News provided by RWJBarnabas Health.

>> It's been almost two years since 25-year-old Victoria Lee was shot and killed by police during a mental health crisis response at her home in Fort Lee in 2024.

Officers responded to a 911 call from her family seeking an ambulance to transport her to the hospital.

But instead, Lee was shot dead by police within minutes of the officers arriving on the scene.

Her family has now filed a wrongful death lawsuit.

We reached out to the Fort Lee Police Department for a comment about the suit, but didn't hear back in time for this taping.

I'm joined now by the attorney leading the lawsuit, Amelia Green, to explain the case.

We do want to warn you, the images and the body camera footage you're going to see in this interview are graphic and difficult to watch.

Amelia, thank you so much for being with us.

Before we discuss the details of your lawsuit, I do want to give our viewers a chance to see and hear some of what happened in the moments leading up to Victoria being fatally shot by police.

Let's take a look at some of the body camera footage that was released.

I'm going to break the door down.

Go ahead and stab you in the neck.

Sir, sir, can we please step back please?

We don't want to shoot you.

We want to talk to you.

You want to go less lethal or you want to go lethal?

So if you couldn't tell right there, the officers were saying, "We don't want to shoot you.

Who wants to go lethal?

Who wants to go less lethal?"

I think it was the last question that was asked before they did break the door down.

Amelia, in your view, what do you make of the way that officers responded to this mental health crisis call?

It was completely improper.

They violated Fort Lee's own policies and some of the most basic protocols for responding to a mental health call.

They should have de-escalated the situation, used time and space, talked to her family members, determined whether there was any threat.

Instead, they went opened and broke down her door without any justification after her mother was begging them, "Please don't come in," and used lethal, unjustifiable force, even though she was not a threat to them.

- Is there a scenario in which officers are justified to break down a door in a, what's called a barricaded situation?

- There absolutely are scenarios where that's justifiable.

The problem is the circumstances for that were not present here.

They were not present here.

And I think that before they broke down her door, the first officer to arrive at the scene actually saw Victoria Lee and her mother and entered and opened the door to the apartment.

Victoria closed the door.

Before that door was closed, he saw she was not a threat to anyone.

Her mother was not in any danger.

Her brother was not in any danger.

The justification in that situation would be if there were actually someone in danger and there wasn't anyone here.

And even after breaking down the door, within three seconds, they used deadly force that wasn't justified either.

Excessive force.

She was not a threat to injuring those officers.

They saw she had a water jug in her hand.

There was no reason for trigger-happy officers to break down her door, let alone to use deadly force against her.

- Prior to them opening the door, the officer could be heard there saying, I'm going to kick down this door.

And she said, if you do, I will stab you in the bleep neck.

Is that a threat that the officer could deem put them in harm's way?

- Absolutely not.

That would give an indication they should not be breaking down the door.

They should be trying to communicate and escalate, deescalate.

They understood that this was a situation that was escalating.

And they understood that the officers were the ones that were posing the threat to Victoria and agitating Victoria.

They should have deescalated the situation, tried to calmly communicate.

Instead, they escalated the situation by breaking down the door.

They understood that that could present a dangerous situation.

The only discussion they had was who would go lethal.

They're talking about shooting Victoria rather than making a plan of how to get her to the hospital safely.

- And this happened July 28th, early in the morning of 2024.

About a year later, July 14th, 2025, a grand jury declined to bring any criminal charges against the officer who fired that lethal shot, Anthony Pickens Jr.

What, if any, impact does that grand jury failure to bring charges have on your civil case?

Absolutely none.

The fact that the grand jury declined to prosecute these officers criminally says nothing about whether Victoria's rights were violated.

This is a suit about accountability of the Fort Lee Police Department and the violation of Victoria's constitutional rights.

These officers used excessive force, which is a violation of the Constitution.

They entered her home without a warrant and without a sufficient emergency to enter.

They took her life in doing so, within less than two minutes of arriving at the scene.

They had no plan.

They made no efforts to de-escalate.

They made no efforts to talk to her mother.

They made no efforts to determine if anyone is in danger.

If they had, they would have known she, what, no one was in danger.

The family was simply trying to get her to the hospital.

And with a police led response, they escalated the situation when Victoria was not a threat to anyone.

The officers were the biggest threat in this situation.

This came at a time when there was heightened attention around the issue of police response during a mental health crisis.

Victoria Lee was one of a few other cases that that really dominated the news cycle at the time.

Following that, New Jersey Attorney General Matt Plattken did change some of the state policies saying that if there was ever a barricade situation, a supervisor would need to be present.

And I should point out that at the time, Fort Lee was not participating in what's called the Arrive Together program, which pairs a mental health professional with a police officer.

Does the fact that state policy changed after that Fort Lee joined the Arrive program a year after this incident, almost a year after, does that have any bearing on your case and whether or not these damages that you're seeking could be awarded?

The reality is we didn't need these new laws to save Victoria's life.

The laws and that were broken here and the protocols that were broken in the situation are some of the most basic protocols that were already well known at the time.

You do not escalate a situation.

You give time and space.

You consult with family members.

You make a plan.

We didn't need this new law to save Victoria's life.

However, this lawsuit is about seeking accountability, which Fort Lee has not shown any accountability to date.

The family hasn't even gotten an apology.

There's been no recognition.

And so these new statutes recognizing that this is a problem and their need to make a change are critically important.

Nevertheless, we didn't need these new statutes for Victoria to be alive today.

Help us understand in this civil case, what damages are you seeking and who will decide that?

Sure, we are seeking damages for violations of Victoria's constitutional rights, violations of the Americans with Disability Act.

She was discriminated against because she had a mental health disability.

And that includes loss of life damages for the entire life lost by Victoria.

She had such a beautiful life ahead of her that these officers took away.

The pain and suffering when she was shot and killed, the pain she felt in her last moments.

We're also seeking damages for her family members who witnessed this horrific shooting and unjustifiable use of force against their daughter.

None of, no damages will get Victoria back, but the jury is going to decide the amount of damages in this case for the pain and suffering she and her family endured.

All right.

We thank you so much for taking time to talk about this with us.

A late spring freeze left many farmers out in the cold this summer, causing widespread crop damage across the state, in some cases wiping out entire crops for the year.

On top of that, fuel and fertilizer costs have risen dramatically as a result of the war in Iran.

Now, Governor Mikey Sherrill and other elected officials have pushed for federal support, a disaster declaration and subsequent funding to help make up for the losses, but so far farmers haven't received any financial help.

I recently spoke to Rebecca Alstead-Mowdry from Alstead Farms in Chester about their response to the weather and all the other pressures facing their farm.

Hi, Rebecca.

It's great to have you on the show.

Can you tell us how Allstate Farms fared in the wake of this April freeze that impacted so many crops across the state?

Yeah, absolutely.

And thank you for having me.

We definitely had this massive freeze that occurred towards the end of April, and it really did affect all the way from upstate New York down to North Carolina.

It affected tree fruit, apples, peaches, had the potential to affect blueberries, strawberries, and you definitely see a lot of widespread damage all across the whole region and we are definitely not alone in that.

But we were able to really protect our crops and to utilize multiple different protection methods to really still be able to harvest a crop.

So we were able to use machinery that was pushing hot air into the orchards, just trying to raise the orchard degree, the orchard temperature, just a couple degrees.

We also use irrigation techniques that spread water all across our fields.

And as the water was freezing, it was releasing heat that protected those blossoms, which is what we were trying to protect so much.

So we are now through our strawberry season.

We had a fantastic strawberry season, one of the best that we've had yet.

And that was definitely credited towards our team that was out in the fields overnight, covering them, keeping them warm.

We are right in the middle of our blueberry season.

Again, one of the better blueberry seasons we've had.

And we're starting to harvest some peaches.

We're definitely harvesting a little bit lower quantities than we're used to, but our protection efforts did work to the point that we are able to sell both yellow and white peaches right now.

Let me ask you this, Rebecca, was this equipment and machinery that you already had, already had made investments in, that you were able to utilize when the weather changed, or did you have to go and run out and purchase this?

So a little mix of both.

We've gotten really good at, you know, farming with this adversity with different weather patterns.

So we have a couple of these things already on farm.

We had the irrigation techniques, we had the cover for the strawberries.

We did end up going to purchase another one of the wind machines.

And we did purchase some of the candles that we used out in the fields before each frost night.

How does that investment, I guess my bigger question is, when you lose a crop, you lose potentially your income for the year, right?

When we talk about farms in New Jersey and farming overall, we know and we hear so often that the margins are so thin.

When you have to make investments in this type of crop-saving infrastructure, do the costs ever outweigh the benefits?

Or in a situation like this, is it always better to have that investment made?

Yeah, so we're lucky to be in a place that we do agritourism, which means a direct marketing.

So everything we're growing is being sold to our customers, our customers are usually coming on farm.

And not only are they coming to pick our crops and enjoy the farm, but they're also, you know, buying other crops that are in the store or they're buying ice cream or coffee.

So that kind of investment in this crop saving technology has never been more expensive than what the protection we get out of it.

We've always erred on the side of purchasing this infrastructure to be able to continue to have crops so that our guests can keep coming to the farm, keep enjoying the farmland, and keep being able to have something to pick at the end of the year.

So you are definitely faring better than some, perhaps even than many in the state.

But we also just came out of this cyclospora outbreak across the country, although here in New Jersey I don't believe it was ever officially considered an outbreak.

But as a local farm, seeing kind of all the fear of fresh produce that was rising as folks were really becoming aware of this parasite.

Did that help you?

Did that hurt you?

What was the impact locally?

Yeah, definitely.

I think we saw a lot of people that were starting to really wonder where their food is coming from.

And we saw a lot of people coming to us knowing that they would be able to get a hold of one of us that's actually in the fields growing the crops and be able to know how their food was being grown.

I think across the state, you saw more of a push towards local produce and knowing that local was safe, especially when, you know, my team is in the ground planting, harvesting, washing, and then bringing it right to the store.

So we were able to control that whole process.

And I think we were really successful in telling our customers our story, sharing how local produce is safer.

And I think it really did benefit the local farmers in the state.

And I wish that would continue even when there's no outbreak in more commercial farming.

I think New Jersey has so much local food grown here, and I wish that support was there all the time.

- It did raise, I saw just on social media, you know, local farmers coming out and saying, "Look, this isn't the type of thing that you get when you buy local."

Not everyone understands that though.

How do you get that message out there?

- Yeah, so I think we've tried multiple different ways.

We have a fantastic social media crew that's been out filming content, getting that story out there.

As people call us and email us or come into our store, we're constantly sharing, you know, I'm the one that's in the fields, you know, our team is right in the fields.

They can tell you exactly how they're washing and planting and growing these crops.

And I think the more we talk to people and the more people know that we are a dependable farm and a dependable family to be able to get your produce from, the more that message spreads and the more that message is shared.

And I think just like we're doing today, I think, yeah, go ahead.

Well, I was going to say, you know, you have other pressures that you're also dealing with.

And I know that when we talked about margins, the impact on the cost of fuel and fertilizer because of the conflict overseas has had a direct impact on local farms, on big farms.

How are you managing that?

What type of cost increases have you seen since this conflict started?

Yeah, I think in general, farming has been getting more and more expensive.

I don't know that you could pin it to one certain thing.

It's been happening year over year, whether it's the price of labor, the price of fuel, the price of fertilizer, even just the price of supplies we need, rubber bands to bunch our carrots, crates to store the crops in.

So it's a continuing expense.

It's constantly more expensive to grow things.

And we are really trying to grow such a variety of things that we're able to absorb that costs a little bit more without having to put so much of that on our customers.

And I think it's important to note that when you buy from a local farm and you see that their crops are a little more expensive, that is why, because we are handling all of those costs ourselves, just over what we're producing.

So the message here, buying local and New Jersey's got some pretty great crops.

That's always my go-to.

Yes.

No better peach than a Jersey peach at this time of year.

-Absolutely.

-All right, Rebecca Alsted-Mowdry, co-owner and assistant production manager at Alsted Farms.

Thank you so much.

-Thank you.

-If you're from Jersey, you know better than to pump your own gas, and a new Fairleigh Dickinson University poll finds that most of us want to keep it that way.

Voters also weighed in on a proposed pet tax credit and whether alcohol should be sold at movie theaters.

And some of the answers may surprise you.

I recently sat down with the executive director of the FDU poll, Dan Cassino, to break down the numbers and to ask how pollsters plan to get it right heading into the midterms.

This conversation is part of our Under the Dome series.

Dan, it's great to see you.

If someone were playing the game, you know you're in Jersey when?

The answer might be you don't have to pump your own gas.

You recently polled residents about it.

How do the voters feel?

Is this something we still want?

You know, we've been pulling this for 20 years now, and every time we think, well, maybe next time will be different.

Look, things might be different now.

We are now the last state where you don't have pump your own gas.

Oregon gave up the ghost.

And we pulled this 15 years ago.

Our former director said, well, we should probably do this again in the summer to see if our attitudes change based on the seasons.

And this time we did pull in the summer.

We did pull it 15 years later and things have not changed at all.

64% of voters in Jersey say that they want to keep the system as we have now, where someone has to pump your gas for you at full service.

Only 23% say they want to change things.

You know, this is something New Jersey voters want.

They have always wanted.

And at a time where everything is up for grabs, and everything is changing all around us, it's good to know some things are stable, like people in New Jersey do not want to pump their own gas.

- Yeah, I am among them.

And when we look at how it breaks down among gender and even age, I fall right into those categories.

How does it break down though?

Because that is where you saw a little disparity.

- Yeah, so we've seen this before, where women are more likely to support the status quo of full-service gasoline more than men are.

We actually don't know what that is.

It could be that women, this is a safety issue for women, that's the way it's been marketed in the past.

But it also could be that men like doing stuff with their cars and this is something to do with the car, so men are more likely to say they wanna do it.

The other side is age.

And actually, this is one that surprised me, was that the people most supportive of full-service gasoline are the youngest voters.

And I think that might be because they don't know how to pump their own gas.

I know I've got a 16-year-old son, he has never pumped gas in his life.

So I can imagine him saying, "Yeah, no, we should keep the system the way it is, and maybe just not drive to Pennsylvania."

- Yeah, and some of us have stories of putting diesel fuel in our cars because we're so not used to pumping our own gas.

A story for another day.

But by all accounts, we don't wanna get out of our cars.

You also polled about something that I find a little bit surprising, somewhat humorous, but for all the pet owners out there, there is a bill on the table that they could potentially see a tax credit for having a pet.

First of all, can you tell us about it and then what do the people want here?

So this is a bill that's in the State Assembly, proposed by Republican McDonough and Jackson, and it would give a $300 tax credit, so not a deduction.

Deduction is when you reduce the amount of taxes you're paying taxes, the amount of income you're paying taxes on.

This is a credit, so it actually just reduces the amount of taxes you owe or increase the size of your refund.

$300 for having a cat or a dog.

Those are the weird exceptions in the bill, but this would give that tax credit to anyone who owns a cat or a dog and up to $600 extra tax credit for veterinary bills.

Now, I put this in the poll thinking, well, this is an issue of public debate.

This is in the state legislature.

It's important to inform the state legislature what the public wants.

If I didn't think it would get much support, honestly, and it winds up, it turns out voters actually like this.

45% say they support this idea, 41% are opposed.

You know, it seems probably pet owners like the idea of getting more money.

You know, from a tax policy perspective, maybe not the best way to spend taxpayer dollars, especially since people who own pets tend to be richer on the whole, not the group that needs tax cuts, but you know, people like money, they like their pets, so why not?

- Yeah, this comes at a time when we've seen big debate and finally something moved through in the final budget for a tax credit for seniors.

We can't figure that out yet in a way that keeps everyone happy.

So I think pets, I'm not sure how that bill moves through, but that's a conversation also for another day.

This one, hey if you've got kids and you've got to go sit through some insufferable movies, I could understand the push here, but you took a poll to see whether or not people want movie theaters to sell alcohol.

Do they?

Yeah, so this is actually a bill that's already moved through the state assembly.

It's in the state senate now, and this is a big push from movie theaters.

They've been suffering from much reduced attendance in movie theaters since the pandemic and the rise of streaming.

And they say, "We're going to go out of business unless we have new revenue streams."

And what's been suggested is they'd be allowed to buy liquor licenses at a reduced rate.

Now, in some cases, movie theaters already have liquor licenses, but they buy them from the municipality that they're in.

And those can be very, very expensive.

This bill would allow movie theaters to buy liquor licenses for $200,000 or $150,000, depending on how much local liquor they're buying.

And movie theaters like it, but voters do not.

So when we asked voters about this, 58% are opposed, only 39% in favor of it.

This is a big deal because this is already in the state Senate.

And this is some of the most important stuff we do, is let the state legislature know that voters don't like this.

We know that the Murphy administration in its last year really pushed for liquor license reform, wasn't going to get a whole lot done on that.

And it seems like there is just kind of a congenital aversion to changing the liquor license laws.

Voters in Jersey kind of like the way things are.

We also have seen- - Well, it's a bit complicated too there, right?

Because people who do own liquor licenses in New Jersey, especially in municipalities where there are only a handful to give out, have paid top dollar, right?

They paid premium dollars for those licenses.

And so I know some of the argument there when Governor Murphy at the time proposed it was that this isn't fair to those who've invested their life savings.

Is that part of why the voters in your poll were opposed to it?

- You know, I think that might do it, but I'm not sure how much voters really know about this.

We know New Jersey is the home of the most expensive single liquor license ever sold.

You have $2.1 million for a liquor license in Short Hills.

And a lot of movie theaters have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for liquor licenses.

But I think it really is much more about behavior inside of movie theaters.

You know, people already kind of forgot how to be in a movie theater, and they have their phones out, or are scrolling and texting while they're in the theater.

And I can't imagine adding alcohol to the mix is gonna make things any better.

- Yeah, that's a good point.

Courtesy and decorum in movie theaters has definitely dropped.

Just a little bit of time that we have left.

We've seen a shift in political polling over the years, especially since we saw a lot of polls get it wrong when Governor Murphy won his gubernatorial election the second time.

That's when we saw like a kind of a real shift away from the type of polling that we've been used to.

How are you approaching polling as we head into the midterms?

So this, the upcoming midterms are actually really difficult to poll, and a lot of that is because of the likely voter models.

Figuring out who exactly is going to vote, and that's been the problem in 2024 and 2021.

That's the biggest problem we face, is we can figure out how people are going to vote, but we can't figure out if they're going to actually vote or not.

And so we're going to do, what we're doing at the FDU poll, is we're going to be building our likely voter model based not just on 2024, which was actually a bad year for Democrats, but bring as much old data as we can from voters who were around in 2020, 2021, even 2025.

So we're going to do as much as we can to bring in as many elections to try and get that likely voter model as correctly as possible.

The other thing we're doing is we are adapting, and I think a lot of polls have done this, to a weighting structure based on region.

So we're no longer just weighting people deciding who's going to vote, decide what the likely voter structure is going to look like, based on age and sex and education.

We're also going to be throwing in where you live to try and make sure we get a fair representation of that.

If anything, I think our model is likely to be biased against Democrats in the midterm election, simply because 2024 was such a bad year, and that's going to be so important for figuring out who's going to vote.

Best way to predict who's going to vote now is who voted in the past, and a lot of people just didn't vote in 2024.

So there's going to be some bias.

We're doing everything we can to correct for it, but at the end of the day, polling is an art and a science, and that's getting into more of the art side of things.

Yeah, we'll be watching to see.

Dan Cassino, Executive Director of the Fairleigh Dickinson University Poll.

Good stuff.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Under the Dome is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.

That's going to do it for us tonight.

I'm Joanna Gagis.

For the entire team here at NJ Spotlight News, thanks for being with us.

We'll see you right back here tomorrow.

NJM Insurance Group, serving the insurance needs of residents and businesses for more than 100 years.

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