Token-booth torch bid bust
THIS IS one fired-up firebug.
An unhinged straphanger tried to torch a token booth at a lower Manhattan train stop — with the MTA clerk still inside, officials said Friday.
The burly and bearded brute went berserk when the 44-yearold token booth clerk forbid him to enter the subway without paying through an emergency exit door at the Fulton St. station about 4:45 p.m. Wednesday. The man (photo) began hurling profanities at the clerk, then wrote the curse words, as well as a few threatening messages, on the token booth’s glass, cops said.
A few moments later, he lit several matches and began pitching them into the token booth’s money slot. He also lit a piece of paper on fire and threw it at the booth, before dashing off to the A and C train platform.
He is described as black, about 6-foot-tall and 300 pounds with black curly hair and a full beard that is graying around the chin. A QUEENS teen, after leaving his house against his parents’ protests, was found suffocated in an overgrown marsh the next morning, police and relatives said.
Andy Peralta, 17, left his Corona home — without saying where he was going — after eating dinner with his mom about 6:45 p.m. Monday.
“I said, ‘Don’t go. You know I don’t like it when you go out at night,’” recalled Peralta’s mother, Rosa Jaramillo, 50.
“He said, ‘Mom, I’ll come back. I’m only going right here, and I’ll come back.”
They were the last words she would ever hear from her son.
A hiker walking through a marshy swath of Kissena Park discovered Peralta’s body just after noon Tuesday.
The teen was found with injuries to his head and his pants pulled down. An autopsy revealed that Peralta was asphyxiated.
Authorities identified the victim and declared his death a homicide Friday.
“I cannot imagine what happened,” his shattered mother told the Daily News. “My boy, my beautiful boy. I don’t have words.”
Peralta’s parents said they called the police about 11 p.m. Monday after their son failed to return home.
The following afternoon, cops alerted them to the discovery of an unidentified body inside the park roughly 5 miles away.
Peralta’s mother went to a local precinct stationhouse where she carried out the grim task of identifying photos of her slain son.
“I don’t know who could have done this to him,” said the teen’s father Edgar Peralta, 47.
“He was good, the poor boy. I don’t know how this happened. Everyone knew he was nice and quiet.”
An Ecuadorian native, Andy Peralta joined his parents in the U.S. three years ago. He attended Newtown High School and dreamed of a career in computers.
His parents said another student’s mother told them she had heard that three classmates had threatened to kill Peralta.
“They were bad friends,” the victim’s father said. “I don’t know who but they wanted to kill him.”
Police were hunting for Peralta’s killer.
Cops spent the last several days scouring the streets around Kissena Park looking for surveillance video that might show Peralta entering the park.
They were also trying to piece together the teen’s whereabouts before he died.
Several people, including Peralta’s girlfriend, posted anguished messages on Peralta’s Facebook page after learning about his killing.
“You were very young, you are missed a lot,” she wrote. “We will find those culpable.”
Anyone with information about the crime is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 800577-TIPS. All calls will be kept confidential.