Hardhat hell
Boss shot by ‘hothead’ in W. Side slay-suicide
AN ENRAGED carpenter — just two days after getting canned — returned to a construction site in Hell’s Kitchen Thursday and fatally shot the foreman who fired him.
Samuel Perry went to the 37th floor of the luxury building going up on W. 59th St. near 11th Ave. It was 7:10 a.m. and no one was expecting him.
Perry, 44, calmly handed his tools to a colleague.
“These are yours now,” he said, according to a witness.
Perry whipped out a gun, executed Christopher Sayer, 37, in front of horrified workers and briefly disappeared. The killer was found dead in a bathroom on the fifth floor. Police said he shot himself in the head. A handgun was found near his body.
Fellow construction worker Robert (Spider) Pagan said he had just heard what sounded like gunshots when he brushed past Perry in a 31st-floor stairwell, the shooter probably on his way to his cowardly end.
“I was shocked when I saw him this morning,” Pagan recalled. “I jokingly asked him, ‘Sammy, did you bring a gun to the job site?’ ”
“Not me, Spider,” Perry responded.
“And now I find out he shot my friend,” Pagan said.
The gunman signaled to his Queens neighbor on Tuesday — the day he got fired — that he was plotting revenge.
“He’s gonna get his,” Perry said, according to Karrine Gayle, 26, who lives on the same block in Far Rockaway.
“He said the person has been pushing his buttons for a long time and he’d had it,” added Gayle, who noted that she didn’t know who he was talking about.
Gayle said she didn’t take Perry seriously until he started packing up his belongings for his son and cashed in a coin collection at Stop & Shop.
“Yesterday, I tried to talk him out of it because he said he had his mind made up and was packing stuff, but I didn’t know what to do,” Gayle said.
Workers told police the gunman was a “bit of a hothead,” said NYPD Deputy Chief Christopher McCormack.
“We are still looking into how he got into the building,” McCormack said.
Perry, who was known as “The Bull” for his fearsome strength, was fired after he got into a fight with Sayer over a wall he had just put up, co-workers said.
Reached at her Long Island home, a woman who identified herself as Sayer’s sister-in-law teared up as she described him as “such a good guy.”
“I wish there was a new adjective for how terrible this is,” she said. “He was 37. He had big plans.”
Co-workers described Sayer, of Plainview. L.I., as a quiet and well-liked boss who had a good rapport with his workers.
“Chris is one of the best guys,” said fellow worker Denis Greaves, 75. “He never gave nobody a hard time.”
Perry was arrested three times in the city. Two of the arrests were sealed. The third was for a robbery in 1995, cops said.
Gayle said Perry’s wife committed suicide in 2015. While Perry was sleeping, she poured gasoline on her body and set herself on fire.
A neighbor who identified himself as Mike said Perry asked him to watch his dog, a pit bull named Bruno, because he was “going away to take care of something.”
Mike said he was confused when he left his house at 5 a.m. Thursday and saw Bruno tied to his railing.
The building under construction, 3 Waterline Square, will boast 47 condos and 167 rental apartments. It’s expected to open near the end of next year.
The building is part of a massive Riverside Center redevelopment plan, expected to bring five residential towers to the area. The complex is expected to hold 2,500 apartments, 140,000 square feet of retail space, an elementary school and a hotel, according to Curbed.com. THE CASE against a man accused of murdering a Howard Beach jogger took a new turn Thursday when defense lawyers said they wouldn’t be pushing an insanity defense.
Chanel Lewis’ lawyers at the Legal Aid Society formally told Queens Supreme Court Justice Gregory Lasak they wouldn’t use the defense to beat charges for Karina Vetrano’s killing.
Instead, Lewis’ lawyers say they’re going to take a hard look at the validity of the DNA evidence and Lewis’ confession to the August 2016 murder.
A Queens prosecutor told the judge he wasn’t expecting the defense would pull back the mental fitness issue, according to DNAinfo.
The sides are due back in court in November, when prosecutors are slated to turn over DNA evidence.