Resident reports filed between April and June have pushed a research database at The College of New Jersey to 370 cancer cases. The figure is a ninefold surge from the 41 cases first tallied three months ago, and the latest evidence of a health crisis tied to a landfill the DEP shut down in 1979 and never finished cleaning.
Bay Ridge Realty Corp., the Brooklyn-based owner of the property, has paid none of the $1,223,000 in penalties that the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection assessed across four years, and the site has never been remediated since the agency ordered its closure in 1979. Bay Ridge is challenging the fines in a consolidated hearing before the Office of Administrative Law; that hearing is pending.
The study zone covers roughly six-tenths of a square mile in Keyport and Union Beach, abutting the old Aeromarine Industrial Park site where the DEP found benzene, PCBs, arsenic and vinyl chloride in 2010. The zone is bounded by Third Street to the south, Broad Street to the west and Raritan Bay to the north. Dr. Alexis Layman Mraz, a public health scientist at The College of New Jersey, analyzed nearly 300 verified cases in the area, against a control group of more than 80 residents without cancer. She found a 15 percent higher likelihood of diagnosis inside the study zone, a figure she reported with 95 percent confidence.
Mraz recorded an incidence rate of 757 cases per 100,000 person-years inside the designated area against 670 per 100,000 across Monmouth County overall. Dr. Hari Iyer, a professor at Rutgers University Cancer Institute, independently reviewed the findings and said the 15 percent figure goes beyond what researchers typically see in epidemiological studies and supports the community's concerns, though he agreed more study is needed to determine causation.
The analysis meets the federal definition of a cancer cluster, Mraz said, but both researchers cautioned that the study cannot establish causation. The data came from self-reported surveys collected over two months. For homes that did not respond, Mraz used the Monmouth County baseline; she also found that distance from the landfill served as a significant predictor of risk.
Pacer Partners, which is negotiating to buy the site from Bay Ridge Realty, applied for a testing permit in February; the DEP approved the request around April 23. Pacer hired an environmental engineering consultant to investigate conditions at the site while the DEP runs its own independent sampling program. Groundwater collection has finished, surface water sampling began in June and vapor and soil work continues. Neither the DEP nor the consultant has released as of publication.
The New Jersey Department of Health is waiting for those environmental results before launching any formal public health assessment. A full assessment requires environmental data, plus either Superfund listing, an agency request or a community petition. The department has not entered the reported cases into any official tally. The state cancer registry has no record of a cluster that residents mapped themselves. "We recognize the fears and questions that residents and families in the Keyport community are experiencing, and we take those concerns very seriously," Dalya Ewais, a spokeswoman for the agency, said in the NJ.com report.
No elected official who spoke up in April has said anything new since NJ.com’s June 23 reporting. While the agencies wait, the residents have stopped asking for permission to be sick.
Adam Poling received an osteosarcoma diagnosis at age 15. "That site has been toxic longer than I've been alive," he told NJ.com. "I need to know the truth."
Lauren Mohr-Nagurka's sister Marie Mohr died in 2025 of Cancer of Unknown Primary, after making her home less than a quarter mile from the landfill for a decade. "What I don't understand is how somebody, knowing there was contamination, could close their eyes and go to sleep at night knowing that this could cause serious illness to people," Mohr-Nagurka said in her interview with NJ.com. She added: "They have to do everything humanly possible to find out who is responsible and what do we do going forward."
Rusty Morris, who no longer lives in Keyport, said his mother and father remain on First Street. He started mapping cases in February after his father received a prostate cancer diagnosis. He told NJ.com: "I have been hoping that the researchers would designate this as normal occurrences, but the fact that they came back with the results they did is heartbreaking. There is no denying that something is going on in our area."
Nina Jacobs Pantozzi, who spent twenty-five years on First Street, learned she had cancer in her kidneys in 2012. Surgeons removed part of Pantozzi's kidney, and for nine years the disease remained stable before it advanced to her liver. Her mother, Jacobs Kelley, died in 2018 after roughly four decades in the First Street home. The cause was metastatic lung cancer. She never smoked.
The site is still unremediated, the debt still uncollected, the cases still climbing. The state still has not knocked on the door.
Pantozzi’s mother died 39 years after the DEP ordered the landfill closed. Her daughter told NJ.com, "I think it's absolutely appalling that this has been neglected and not addressed for decades, that there are agencies that are supposed to protect the public who have dropped the ball for one reason or another but have not taken this seriously.”
Related Articles
• Keyport Cancer Cluster: 41 Cases, $900K in Unpaid Fines, and a 40-Year Enforcement Gap
• The Zombie Pipeline Rises: How a Rejected NJ Gas Project Was Resurrected by Federal Pressure
Sources
• Central Jersey, "Cancer Cases Near Keyport Landfill Surge to 370, New Study Finds" (June 24, 2026)
• Frank Pallone Jr., U.S. Representative (D, 6th District), letter to agencies (April 17, 2026)
• Karin Price Mueller, NJ.com, "Exclusive: N.J. cancer cluster fears backed by bombshell new data as cases skyrocket" (June 23, 2026)
• New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, "Keyport Landfill" (June 4, 2026)
• New Jersey Department of Health and New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, "Update on Keyport Sanitary Landfill at Aeromarine Industrial Park" (April 30, 2026)
• NJ Spotlight News, "Keyport follow-up study finds almost 10 times more cancer cases" (June 24, 2026)