NEW YORK CITY -- The NYPD is again planning to beef up patrols in Times Square and Midtown the night of Easter Sunday, a day that in recent years has seen violence as part of a yearly gang initiation ritual following the Javits Center car show.

Police say the Easter Day "wilding" started years ago but became especially violent in 2010, when hundreds of gang members attended the annual auto show at the Javits Center, then conducted gang initiations in Times Square.

Two women were shot during the sprawling brawl, two other people were wounded and several police officers injured. More than 50 people were arrested.

Since then, police have beefed up Easter patrols and monitored activity at the car show. The Daily News reports the NYPD is also monitoring social media to look for gang members who may be planning a "mobbing" through Times Square.

Read more news from NBCNewYork.com

There have not been any gang incidents on Easter since 2010, and the NYPD is looking to keep it that way.

"For me, it's a religious holiday and it should be respected," said Michael Hoard in Times Square Friday night.

The police "are here to protect us, that's the bottom line," said Al Centrella of Hempstead, who was in the area with his wife to see a show.

A man who admitted faking his own drowning at a New York beach pleaded not guilty on new charges that he posed as a police officer and has been placed on suicide watch, his lawyer said Thursday.

Raymond Roth tried to "hurt himself" in custody and his family considered having him committed before he was arrested again for impersonating a police officer, Roth's lawyer, Brian Davis, said.

Roth last week admitted faking his death at Jones Beach in exchange for a 90-day jail sentence, but had not started serving that time when he allegedly impersonated a cop just hours after appearing in court.

That plea deal could be in jeopardy and Roth could now face as many as four years in jail for faking his own death to collect an insurance policy.

In this latest case, he faces more than 20 years in prison on attempted kidnapping, attempted burglary and criminal impersonation charges. He pleaded not guilty and is due back in court on April 24.

Roth is accused of following a woman in van in a Freeport, saying "Get in the van or I will arrest you. I am a police officer," according to court papers.

Surveillance video released by investigators allegedly shows a man following a woman into a check-cashing store. According to police, after the woman went to a back office area, the man tried to convince her to come out by claiming to be a cop.

"Open the door." Roth allegedly said, according to court papers. "I'm the police. Open the door, I'm a detective in the county."

Read more news from NBCNewYork.com

He did not show a badge or phony identification, one police official said, but, according to court papers, patted his waist to create the impression he had a gun.

Authorities said they also are investigating his connection to two other similar impersonation incidents in Freeport.

Last July, Roth's son told authorities that his father went for a swim at Jones Beach and never came back. After the fruitless search, Roth turned up in Florida and South Carolina.

Prosecutors said father and son had conspired to collect on about $400,000 in life insurance.

Davis has said his client pleaded guilty to ensure his son won't go to jail. The case against his 22-year-old son is pending.

Mike Albans / AP file

In this Dec. 17, 1993 file photo, Joel Rifkin, right, is led to the Nassau County Courthouse in Mineola, N.Y., for a suppression hearing. New Jersey State Police said Wednesday, March 27, 2013, that 25-year-old Heidi Balch likely was the first victim of Rifkin, who is in prison in New York after admitting he killed 17 women in the early 1990s.

A human head discovered on a New Jersey golf course 24 years ago has been identified and is believed to be the first victim of serial killer Joel Rifkin, according to police.

The head belonged to Heidi Balch, who was murdered and dismembered at age 25 in New York, according to a statement issued on Monday by the Hopewell Township, New Jersey police.

During questioning, Rifkin said he dismembered his first victim, a prostitute, and put her head and legs in streams in New Jersey, police said.

Rifkin was convicted of nine murders and is believed to be responsible for at least 17 deaths, most of them prostitutes. He is serving a 203-year prison sentence.

Police periodically tried to identify the New Jersey head and in 2011 obtained a list of prostitution arrests in New York City, from which they found one whose description matched the victim, according to the statement.

They found a missing person report that matched her description but had been ruled out because it said the woman had been last seen in 1995, six years after the head was discovered.

Police met with the person who filed the missing person's report and now believe the sighting date in the report was erroneous.

Rifkin will not be charged with Balch's murder in New Jersey, the statement said.

Her head was found along the edge of a stream at the Hopewell Valley Golf Club in March 1989 and human legs, found to match the head, were discovered later that spring, police said.

When police stopped Rifkin, who lived in East Meadow, New York, in 1993 for missing a license plate, they found the body of a dead woman in the car truck.

Allison Joyce / Getty Images

People participate in a demonstration against the city's stop-and-frisk searches in lower Manhattan near federal court on March 18, 2013 in New York City, the day hearings began.

A federal trial is pulling back the veil on the New York City Police Department's use of the controversial stop-and-frisk tactic.

The nonjury trial, which begins its second week Wednesday, involves a lawsuit from four men who argue the NYPD stops a disproportionate number of black and Hispanic men without cause. The suit seeks to reform stop-and-frisk, which is legal under a 1968 Supreme Court decision.

The NYPD has made about 5 million stops in the past 10 years, and most of them have involved young black and Hispanic men, according to The Associated Press. Only about 10 percent were arrested, with many of the rest left feeling wronged and humiliated. The four plaintiffs contend they were only targeted because of their race.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly have hailed stop-and-frisk as a lifesaver and crime deterrent.

At the heart of the trial is a secretly recorded phone conversation between NYPD officer Pedro Serrano and his supervisor that questions who are the "right people" to stop on the streets, according to The Associated Press. Serrano said he decided to use his phone to record his boss because his supervisors believed he had tallied too few arrests, summonses, and stop, question and frisk reports, known as "250s".

"So, who are the right people?" asks Serrano.

"Depends where you are," answers Deputy Inspector Christopher McCormack.

"So you're saying what? Summons everybody for whatever reason?" Serrano asks.

"No, see, listen to me. Understand this. All right? I don't summons people for any reason, all right," McCormack responds. "We go out there and we summons people and we '250' people, the right people, at the right time, the right location."

"The right people, at the right time, the location" is a thinly-veiled way of mandating officers to stop minorities, lawyers for the four men who have sued police argue. 

McCormack, the supervisor, is expected to testify later in the trial, according to The AP.

Officers deny racial profiling
At least three police officers have testified in pretrial testimony and will be called to testify in trial, according to The New York Times. All three, who are officers in Brooklyn precincts, denied engaging in racial profiling. 

“We can’t just stop anyone for the sake of stopping a person,” Officer Edgar Gonzalez said, reported The Times. 

The officers said they were conducting about 10 street stops a week, making them  “three of the four N.Y.P.D. officers who recorded the highest number of stop, question and frisk encounters,” according to legal papers, The Times said.

“If someone is in the middle of a dark street, staring into the car and then when we drive by, they start ripping up garbage bags,” another one of the officers, Michael Noboa, said.

“That would give me reasonable suspicion to conduct a stop, question” and maybe frisk, he said, reported The Times.

Since the trial began last Monday, various men have testified that they were stopped and frisked by officers while doing mundane tasks such as getting milk from a grocery store or going to a party, reported The AP. They said they weren't doing anything wrong, and felt victimized.

Among them was 18-year-old Nicholas Peart, who said officers swarmed him with their weapons out, and told him and his two relatives to get down on the ground on the night of his 18th birthday. Officers were looking for robbery suspects who they thought resembled Peart and his relatives, The AP reported. Peart didn't think police had enough reason to stop him.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

A man released 23 years after he was wrongly convicted for the 1991 murder of a New York rabbi suffered a heart attack on his second day as a free man, his attorney confirmed to NBC News.

David Ranta was hospitalized after the heart attack, attorney Pierre Sussman said. The man's heart attack was first reported by the New York Times.

“On Friday evening, David Renta suffered a heart attack. My office is happy to report that he’s been stabilized and is being treated in cardiac intensive care at a metropolitan hospital,” Sussman said in a written statement. “He is presently resting, with his family by his bedside. We will continue to ensure that David receives the required, ongoing medical attention he needs.”

Ranta, 58, spent more than two decades in jail after he was found guilty of killing Hasidic rabbi Chaskel Werzberger. A lengthy review of his case ended with prosecutors admitting that the case against Ranta had fallen apart over the years. He was freed at a Brooklyn courthouse on Thursday.

“The accumulated trauma of being falsely convicted and incarcerated for 23 years, coupled with the intense emotions experienced surrounding his release, has had a profound impact on his health,” Sussman said in the statement.

Long-pent emotions welled for relatives when the judge vacated Ranta’s sentence. The man's pregnant daughter, who was two years old when he was jailed, were among those present.

“Sir, you are free to go,” acting state Supreme Court Justice Miriam Cyrulnik said at the Brooklyn courthouse.

“The evidence no longer establishes the defendant’s guilt is beyond a reasonable doubt,” Assistant District Attorney John O’Mara told Reuters.

“I’m overwhelmed,” Ranta told reporters after being cleared. “Right now, I feel like I’m under water, swimming.”

Related:

• NY man cleared, free after 23 years in prison

BOSTON -- New Englanders were preparing for another messy day of snow as they welcomed spring's unseasonable arrival.

Forecasts called for as much as 16 inches of snow in parts of northern New England through Wednesday morning, bringing slippery road conditions. Snow was expected to taper off in other locations.

"It's the real deal — the heavy, wet snow," said National Weather Service forecaster John Cannon in Gray, Maine. "Travel will be treacherous into the early morning hours."

Snow and sleet blasted the Northeast on Tuesday, where some places received over a foot of snow. Classes were canceled in some districts in Massachusetts, Connecticut and upstate New York, adding a few more snow days to the calendar.

Snow also socked other parts of the northern U.S., with as much as 2 feet forecast in parts of Michigan's Upper Peninsula.

Icy roads caused numerous auto accidents. In Marlborough, Mass., the Harlem Globetrotters' bus collided with a car on Interstate 290, but no one was hurt and the bus was able to drive away, the state police said. No citations were issued.

There was nothing unusual about a snowstorm in the Northeast this late in the season, when it can still get plenty cold.

"They don't happen all the time, but it's not, you know, unheard of," said Alan Dunham, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Taunton, Mass.

Nina Walker, of Woburn in suburban Boston, said she had to shovel about 8 inches of snow off her driveway before driving to Boston's South Station to take a train to New York. As a lifelong New Englander, she takes the snow in stride, but draws the line at storms after March 31.

"Once I hear the word 'April,' I am really offended when I hear the word 'snow,'" she said. "So this is OK today, but a couple of weeks from now, it had better not happen."

Related:

Full coverage from weather.com

Severe storms, large hail cause extensive damage in South

This story was originally published on Wed Mar 20, 2013 5:13 AM EDT

Craig Ruttle / AP

A worker, with black fire helmet at left, is rescued from an MTA subway construction project in New York early Wednesday.

NEW YORK -- A construction worker was rescued from an underground trench at the site of the Second Avenue subway construction project after being stuck in mud for nearly four hours Tuesday night.

The worker became trapped at about 8:30 p.m. ET -- in what firefighters at the scene described as "muck" -- from the waist down inside the trench about 75 feet below street level, FDNY officials said.

Rescuers from the FDNY, NYPD and Office of Emergency Management responded to the site at 95th Street and 2nd Avenue and got the worker out by around 12:30 a.m. ET.

Vacuum systems, pulleys and plywood were brought down into the trench during the rescue effort, with crews switching shifts at one point.

More news from NBCNewYork.com

The worker is said to be in stable condition. Two firefighters sustained minor injuries and one firefighter sustained a serious injury, officials said.

Streets were closed for several blocks around the area as crews worked at the scene.

In August, a controlled blast at the Second Avenue construction site sent rocks flying into the streets when steel plates covering the blast failed.

NBCNewYork.com

Mother Chantelle Legrand with baby Alani Evelyn Mars.

A baby was born on the side of a highway on New York's Long Island Thursday, after the expectant father took a wrong turn on the way to hospital.

The couple was driving on the Seaford Oyster Bay Expressway when they realized they were not going to make it to the hospital in time.

“I said the baby’s coming, the baby’s coming she’s right there," Chantelle Legrand, the mother, told NBC 4 New York. "We pulled over and called 911. And soon as I got out the car, paramedics took me out the car, I had the baby in the ambulance.”

Alani Evelyn Mars, the 8-pound-baby girl, was born healthy. She is the couple’s third child. Legrand says the birth of Alani was the easiest of the three, though Alani's father might disagree.

“I was really, really nervous and scared. I can’t describe how it felt. It was really, really very nerve racking,” Alani's father, Gregory Mars, said.

The entire family is doing well.

NEW YORK -- A woman clutching her baby son in her arms plunged eight stories out of an apartment window to her death in an apparent suicide on Wednesday, but the baby survived, police said.

Cynthia Wachenheim was found on the street with her son, 10-month-old Keston, near her arms. A police officer who responded took the baby to a hospital, where he was listed in critical but stable condition.

Police discovered a seven-page suicide note under a bed in the apartment Wachenheim shared with her husband. In the note, the 45-year-old Wachenheim said she recognized what she was about to do was "evil" but she was concerned about how her child was developing, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the case. The official was not authorized to speak publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.

It was unclear whether the baby, who neighbors said was an only child, had any mental or physical problems.

A window to the West Harlem apartment was wide open, and there were no signs of struggle inside, police said. There were no safety bars on the apartment's windows. Surveillance footage showed Wachenheim's husband leaving the apartment about an hour before her plunge from the window with the baby.

'I heard a scream'
Area resident Steven Dominguez, 18, was walking to a grocery store with his mother, Adelina Dominguez, when he saw the woman fall. He said the baby bounced off her body, breaking some of the impact of the fall, before hitting the ground nearby.

"I heard a scream like a yell," Dominguez said. "When I got closer, I saw the baby crying."

He said the baby was face-down.

"I was shocked," he said. "I couldn't believe it."

Dominguez said his mother went to pick up the baby, but an emergency response person told her to stand back.

The apartment is in a relatively new building facing Jackie Robinson Park. A crowd of onlookers had gathered nearby Wednesday afternoon, awaiting the medical examiner's office, which would determine the official cause of the woman's death.

More news from NBCNewYork.com

Resident Yaa Dwamena, 32, said she's lived in the building for several years and as long as she's been there she's seen Wachenheim.

"She was very nice, very friendly, very warm," Dwamena said.

She said that the last time she saw Wachenheim was last week.

"I wouldn't have thought anything was wrong with her," she said. "They were a happy-looking family. I wouldn't think anything like this would happen."

Wachenheim went to law school at Columbia University, and her father was a state police spokesman before his death in 2011. She worked in state Supreme Court in Manhattan doing legal research for judges, court officials said.

"We are all deeply saddened about this tragic incident," state courts spokesman David Bookstaver said. "Our thoughts are with Ms. Wachenheim's family."

The fatal shooting of a 16-year-old boy by undercover police sparked a protest in New York City on Monday night.

Kimani Gray was killed in the East Flatbush area of Brooklyn on Saturday, NBCNewYork.com reported.

On Monday, a protest and candlelight vigil for Gray turned “disorderly,” according to police. A store was “ransacked” and one person was arrested.

Police say Gray was approached by two officers on Saturday because he was acting suspiciously, NBCNewYork.com reported. According to police, the officers identified themselves and only fired at Gray after he raised a .38 revolver.

However, one witness at the scene told NBCNewYork.com that he heard no warning being given.

Gray had previously been arrested four times for charges including grand larceny, according to NBCNewYork.com.

NYPD Sgt. John Buthorn said early Tuesday that there had been a “scheduled protest” at about 8:30 p.m. ET.

“They were going from one location to another and it got disorderly,” he said. “One commercial establishment was vandalized … ransacked … several items were stolen and thrown."

More news from NBCNewYork.com

Buthorn said one person was arrested because disorderly conduct. “He was refusing to leave a location,” after he was asked to do so, the officer said.

A Facebook page called Justice For Kimani Gray has been set up and it had 276 followers at 5:40 a.m. ET on Tuesday.

It showed several photographs of the vigil. One picture showed a crowd of people on the street watched by at least two uniformed officers.