Apartment Choice

Leonnel Davis sees change in Rochester and wonders what it means for her new neighbors. "I see growth in the community but not growth around where I live," she said. Up until about three months ago, Davis was living in a home in northeast Rochester, which she was hoping to buy through a contract for deed. However a pending divorce changed her plans, and she moved with her two grandchildren, one 12 and the other 15, to a three-bedroom apartment in the Andover Apartments complex in southeast Rochester. It wasn't the first choice for the 53-year-old grandmother, but searches for three-bedroom apartment kept coming with price tags as high as $1,900 a month in buildings near the city's core. "Who are they building that for? They couldn't be building it for me," she said, noting she pays $900 for rent in her new apartment as she points to needed repairs and cites safety concerns . "I'm on disability, and I'm a single grandparent....

Three Gloucester residents were told this week that they face time behind bars even if they agree to guilty pleas on charges they acted as a maintenance crew to enter an elderly North Andover woman 's apartment and make off with a safe containing jewelry, documents and other belongings last December. Superior Court  Judge Timothy Feeley told Michael Lorenzana, 39, of 14 Sadler St., that he could expect a prison sentence of three years and a day, while Sean Peres, 36, of 3 Lighthouse Way, would face two years and a day in state prison for their roles in the scheme that targeted an 81-year-old woman.  Barbara Brooks Williams , 50, of Gloucester, would face a 2 1/2-year term in a house of corrections, said  Carrie Kimball Monahan , spokeswoman for the office of Essex District Attorney Jonathan Blodgett . The three were in court Thursday for a lobby conference designed to let defendants know what terms a judge would impose if they choose to enter guilty pleas rather then go to trial...

Angie Friesen didn’t think much of it when her sixth-grade daughter, Annelise, told her she’d hit her elbow on a desk at school. It wasn’t until about a week later, when Annelise complained of pain from her elbow down to her hand, that the mother of four took her daughter to the family doctor for an X-ray. Nothing was broken. The pain continued . Within a few months, it had spread to Annelise’s shoulder blade. Another X-ray and a nerve study revealed no damage. Finally, a pediatrician gave a diagnosis. “I hate to even say the word,” Friesen remembers the doctor saying. He suspected her daughter had a condition called CRPS , or complex regional pain syndrome . In adults, the condition can be devastating, with burning pain that spreads, discoloration of a limb and the loss of function. Friesen’s pediatrician apparently didn ’t know it at the time, but children with CRPS often respond well to...