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@CourierTimes Facebook.com/BucksCourierTimes $2Wednesday, October 31, 2018

BUCKS COUNTY

Business ......................A7Classified ....................D7Comics ...................... D6

Obituaries ................B4-5Opinion ......................A8Puzzles ..................... D10

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By Kyle Bagenstose and Thomas Friestad kbagenstose@couriertimes.comtfriestad@couriertimes.com

State Rep. Tina Davis is suing Republican opponent Anthony

Sposato for defamation in county court, i n c o n n e c -tion to a new political ad the Pennsylvania Republican Party funded

with a last-minute cash infu-sion to his campaign fund.

Davis seeks injunction to pull ‘fraudulent’ ad

Davis

Healing message

Local rabbi says there is only one response to darkness: light-ing a candle of goodness and kindnessPhil Gianfi caro, A3.

Terror at Tree of Life

Less than a week after encour-aging congregants to embrace their mortality, rabbi forced to confront his ownNation & World, A6.

By Thomas Friestadtfriestad@couriertimes.com@ThomasFriestad

Both contenders in the race to represent the state’s 10th Senatorial district are no strangers to elected office, and both Marguerite Quinn and Steve Santarsiero see unfinished business left to address.

Quinn said it wasn’t an “automatic yes” for her to leave her state house seat

in the 143rd district, which she has held as a Republican since November 2006. But the Doylestown native said winning the state senate seat from which Sen. Chuck McIlhinney is retiring would allow her to better represent her community, as well as champion legislative priori-ties, including some she said were left on the table during the last session.

“I believe in what I’m doing and I believe that we need

more people like me who are straight shooters and prag-matic, and not on the extreme fringe of what we see coming into office,” Quinn said.

Santarsiero, an attorney and Lower Makefield resident, said he believes he will be able to accomplish more during a four-year state senate term than if he had won his 2016 Congressional race over U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick. He also formerly served as a state representative in the

31st district.“That race, two years ago,

the idea of doing that every two years … God bless Scott Wallace and Brian Fitzpatrick, it’s a terrible thing,” the Democratic candidate said, continuing, “I’m looking for-ward to being in this position,where I can start thinking, ‘OK, what can I do for the community … how can I makea difference?’”

Quinn, Santarsiero square off Quinn

Santarsiero

“They said they were going to run the ad, they need to run it through the committee. That’s all I heard. I got the phone call and did what I was told.”

Anthony Sposato

Both can-didates

aim to take care of unfi n-

ished business

in race for 10th Senate district

seat

By Maryclaire Dale and Allen G. BreedThe Associated Press

PITTSBURGH — Pittsburgh’s Jewish com-munity began burying its dead Tuesday after the synagogue massacre, holding funerals for a beloved family doctor, a pillar of the congregation, and two 50-something broth-ers known as the Rosenthal “boys.”

President Donald Trump, m e a n w h i l e , a r r i v e d i n Pittsburgh to pay his respects and encountered hundreds of shouting, chanting pro-testers with signs such as “It’s your fault” and “Words matter,” a reference to alle-gations his bellicose language has emboldened bigots. Pennsylvania’s governor and the mayor of Pittsburgh declined to join him during the visit.

Earlier in the day, thousands of mourners jammed a syna-gogue, a Jewish community center and a third, undisclosed site for the first in a weeklong series of funerals for victims of the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.

D r . J e r r y R a b i n o w i t z , Daniel Stein and Cecil and David Rosenthal were among 11 people killed in the shoot-ing rampage at the Tree of Life synagogue Saturday. Robert Gregory Bowers, a 46-year-old truck driver who authorities say raged against Jews, was arrested on federal hate-crime charges that could bring the death penalty.

Pittsburgh begins burying its dead

Students from the Yeshiva School in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh pay their respects as the funeral procession for Dr. Jerry Rabinowitz passes their school en route to Homewood Cemetery following a funeral service Tuesday at the Jewish Community Center. Rabinowitz was one of people killed while worshipping at the Tree of Life synagogue on Saturday. [GENE J. PUSKAR/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS]

See SEAT, A2

See DAVIS, A2

See FUNERALS, A2

President Donald Trump, accompa-nied by fi rst lady

Melania Trump, left, and Tree of

Life Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, right, places

a stone from the White House at a

memorial for those killed at the Tree

of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on

Tuesday. [AP PHOTO/

ANDREW HARNIK]

Tuesday’s question: For U.S. Senate, Robert Casey Jr. or Lou Barletta?1. Lou Barletta: 38%2. Robert Casey Jr.: 62%

Today’s question: Should the president have respected the wishes of families of the synagogue shooting victims not to visit?1. Yes2. No

A2 Wednesday, October 31, 2018 Courier Times

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With Tree of Life still cor-doned off as a crime scene, more than 1,000 people poured into Rodef Shalom, one of the city’s oldest and largest synagogues, to mourn the Rosenthal brothers, ages 59 and 54.

The two intellectually

disabled men were “beau-tiful souls” who had “not an ounce of hate in them — something we’re terri-bly missing today,” Rabbi Jeffrey Myers, a survivor of the massacre, said at their funeral. Myers, his voice quivering, told the Rosenthals’ parents and other family members: “The entire world is shar-ing its grief with you, so you don’t walk alone.”

The brothers were widely

known as “the boys,” the Rosenthals’ sister, Diane Hirt, noted. “They were innocent like boys, not hardened like men,” she said.

She said Cecil — a gregar-ious man with a booming voice who was lightheart-edly known as the mayor of Squirrel Hall and the “town crier” for the gossip he managed to gather — would have especially enjoyed the media attention

this week, a thought that brought laughter from the congregation.

Rabinowitz’s funeral was held at the Jewish Community Center in the city’s Squirrel Hill sec-tion, the historic Jewish neighborhood where the rampage took place. Two police vehicles were posted at a side door and two at the main entrance.

A line stretched around the block as mourners

— some in white medical coats, some wearing yar-mulkes, black hats or head scarves — passed beneath the blue Romanesque arches into the brick building.

T h e 6 6 - y e a r - o l d Rabinowitz was a go-to doctor for HIV patients in the epidemic’s early and desperate days, a physi-cian who always hugged his patients as they left his office.

FUNERALSContinued from A1

Davis, D-141, of Bristol Township, filed the defa-mation complaint Tuesday against Sposato and his campaign committee “Friends of Tony Sposato,” seeking more than $50,000 in damages. She also wants the ad off the air and has filed for an injunction.

At a hearing scheduled for Wednesday morning, Davis will ask a judge to order the Sposato cam-paign to immediately stop airing the ad, and share a public message to local media outlets “acknowl-edging their intentional misrepresentation of the facts.”

The Davis campaign also said Tuesday it believes the TV ad has little to do with the house race, but is tar-geted at her competitive race for the Pennsylvania 6th District Senate seat, where she is challeng-ing longtime incumbent Sen. Robert “Tommy” Tomlinson, of Bensalem. She is running in both races.

Davis spokesman Aren Platt speculated the ad likely was not intended to swing the traditionally blue 141st state house dis-trict — where a Democrat has served since at least 1969 — to Sposato, whom he called a “stooge for the

Republican Party.”State campaign finance

records show Sposato’s c o m m i t t e e r e c e i v e d $250,000 from the state party Thursday. The money marked the first-ever reportable donation to his committee, the records show. Sposato confirmed his committee had not pre-viously received donations.

“He’s quite simply a pass-through for funds, so that he can slander Tina Davis, not in the hopes of winning the state house race, but in affecting her state Senate race,” Platt said. “This is ... the reason that voters don’t like poli-tics and politicians. There’s shady money coming to this race, and it’s being used to obfuscate the facts of this campaign.”

Asked about the charac-terization, Sposato said, “I don’t know, I have no idea right now,” and referred comment to an attorney, who was not immediately available.

T h e n e w S p o s a t o a d d e p i c t s f i c t i o n a l “Nationwide Criminal Super Search” results of mugshot-esque pictures of Davis and her husband James Davis.

James Davis was accused in mid-September of steal-ing housing assistance funds intended to cover utility costs for a low-income tenant at a rental property he and his wife co-own. Tina Davis was neither implicated nor

charged in the incident.Authorities dismissed

two felony theft charges against James Davis about two weeks later, after he agreed to repay roughly $30,000 to the Bucks County Housing Authority and stop participating in the program.

The ad claims Tina Davis played a “key part” in her husband’s activities, and depicts snippets from a Bucks County Courier Times article on James Davis’ charges. The article reported that charging documents assigned no criminal liability to Tina Davis, and noted she never was charged in the case.

The documents show Tina Davis had offered to add one tenant to the family’s existing electric account, but had no fur-ther involvement after the tenant declined.

The ad says in a footnote that the “Friends of Tony Sposato” committee paid for it, but Sposato said the Pennsylvania Republican Party told him it would run the ad through his commit-tee using a recent $250,000 donation.

“They said they were going to run the ad, they need to run it through the committee. That’s all I heard; I got the phone call and did what I was told,” Sposato added when reached by phone Tuesday afternoon. He did not elab-orate on what he was told.

Asked whether he stands

by the remarks in the ad, Sposato answered yes. “As far as I know, they were vetted and found credi-ble,” he said, later declining comment on the specifics of what he believed Tina Davis did wrong.

Davis’ state house com-mittee has a cash balance of $8,272.27 as of Friday, while her state senate committee has $236,807 available in her race against Tomlinson. While she is running in both races, if she wins both, she will only serve in one office if she wins both.

The Sposato ad “repeat-edly utters falsehoods to insinuate that Rep. Davis was charged with, is responsible for, and/or benefited from” James Davis’ actions, her cam-paign attorney Adam Bonin wrote in the complaint.

The campaign is arguing that Sposato’s commit-tee ran the ad knowing its statements were “false or with reckless disregard” as to their veracity, meeting the actual malice standard needed to prove defama-tion against a public figure.

The complaint also accuses Sposato and the committee of vio-lating state campaign finance laws, which pro-hibit “knowingly false and fraudulent campaign materials,” and of portray-ing Davis in a false light, causing embarrassment, humiliation, emotional distress and social stigma.

In an emailed state-ment, Bonin said, “We did not make this deci-sion lightly: free speech is a fundamental American value. But the First A m e n d m e n t d o e s n ’ t protect lies. The Sposato campaign and its backers should not be allowed to keep this blatantly false ad on the air, and the voters of Bucks County have a right to an election based on Tina Davis’s record, experience, and true character. The Sposato campaign and its backers should be ashamed of this last-minute dirty trick.”

Bonin said the Davis campaign filed its injunc-tion in county court instead of going directly to the networks, as the Scott Wallace campaign recently did in its successful bid to take a misleading ad off the airwaves in his race against U.S. Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, because of federal law. Though the Federal Communications Commission puts no obli-gation on the networks to carry the Wallace ad from an independent group, it requires them to carry ads authorized by candidates themselves, he said. 

J a s o n G o t t e s m a n , communications direc-tor for the Pennsylvania Republican Party, did not immediately return a list of questions on its $250,000 donation that this news organization emailed to him Tuesday night.

DAVISFrom Page A1

B o t h Q u i n n a n d Santarsiero have rep-r e s e n t e d t h e m s e l v e s as independent voices, though they diverged in how they define it.

Santarsiero decries the influence of lobbyists in Harrisburg, in areas rang-ing from oil and gas to gun safety.

A longtime gun safety advocate, he repeated criticism he previously had leveled at Quinn, saying she weakened her gun bill creating domes-tic violence protections in civil and criminal cases by supporting a consent agreement amendment.

Quinn pointed to her success in passing that bill into law, at a time when she and advocates against domestic violence were tallying fatalities stemming from tragedies the measure might have helped prevent.

S u p p o r t f o r s o m e gun safety measures are just one area Quinn said sets her apart from her Republican caucus. A s o t h e r m a r k s o f independence, she men-tioned her 100 rating from the Pennsylvania Environmental Scorecard

this legislative session, plus her work on 2012 l e g i s l a t i o n r e q u i r i n g impact fees for completed Marcellus Shale gas wells.

“I think that people need to look for someone who likes to play between the 40-yard lines … who actu-ally looks to get something done instead of standing on stairs for press confer-ences and talking about things,” Quinn said, adding, “I do them.”

Santarsiero described education as “the great leveler” and stressed the need for striking the right balance between funding schools with property taxes and state dollars. Lawmakers also ought to sit down with educa-tional stakeholders to discuss factors driving up post-secondary edu-cation costs and establish a plan for lowering them, he said.

“These kids are getting out of school and instead of going and buying a car, buying a house  … they have to pay down that debt,” he said. “That has a direct impact on the economy because those

dollars aren’t going back into the economy.”

E q u a l l y i m p o r t a n t to ensuring affordable opportunities, Quinn said, is making sure the state money spent on education is going to the classrooms.

One bill she said she i n t e n d s t o i m m e d i -ately introduce if she wins re-election  — a measure defining and creating guidelines for telemedicine so health care providers could offer remote physical, mental and behavioral services — could double as a way for schools to provide more guidance counseling to students.

Perhaps the area she and Santarsiero had the most visible overlap was in their passion for representing their communities.

Q u i n n h i g h l i g h t e d her efforts in securing a $1 million state grant for Doylestown Health, for work on its new Center for Heart and Vascular Care, as well as $1.5 million to help expand the Pennsylvania Biotechnology Center.

Santarsiero recalled

a time when, during his time as a state represen-tative, he likely damaged the alignment of his Ford Explorer driving over

potholes in Newtown and Yardley, hoping to persuade PennDOT rep-resentatives along for the ride to focus on local roads

projects.“It did have an impact

and they started doing more of those projects,” he said.

SEATFrom Page A1

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