ROCKAWAY PARK — The corner of a high school football field will be named for Justin Zemser, a star player and midshipman at the United States Navy who was killed last year in an Amtrak crash.
City Councilman Eric Ulrich sponsored the bill to rename the corner of Beach Channel Drive and Seaside Avenue "Midshipman Justin Zemser Way," which is steps from the high school football field where Zemser played ball.
Zemser, 20, was a star player at Channel View School for Research and went on to play wide receiver on the U.S. Naval Academy's sprint team.
He was on his way home to Rockaway Beach in May 2015 when his train derailed outside Philadelphia. The crash killed eight passengers and injured more than 100.
"This is an important, sometimes difficult, part of my job," Ulrich wrote on Facebook.
"Justin was my former intern and a remarkable young man who had his whole life still ahead of him ... May his memory be for a blessing."
In addition to the football team — which made a playoff run in 2012 despite Hurricane Sandy ripping through the school and community, leaving many players in temporary housing — Zemser was active in the community.
He interned for both Ulrich and Councilman Donovan Richards and volunteered with the St. Camillus Special Olympics.
After he was killed, his parents said of their only son that he was "wonderful."
"He was absolutely wonderful. Everybody looked up to my son — there's just no other words I can say," mother Susan Zemser said.
Zemser's street renaming was approved Thursday along with dozens of other renamings, including "The Ramones Way" in Forest Hills and a section of Linden Boulevard to honor Malik "Phife Dawg" Taylor from A Tribe Called Quest.
