What a joyride!
Rice-cooker guy tried to get help: bro
Trolley.
Now, the owner and operator of a small fleet of trolleys used for upscale weddings and special events docks his Jet Ski where he parks his vehicles — at the Brooklyn Marine Terminal on Red Hook’s shore.
He punched his ticket to commuter paradise — and daily adventure — with a $1,000 eBay purchase of a used 1996 Yamaha Wave Venture. Since then, he’s been traveling by Jet Ski about three times a week from April until November.
“It’s a hive of activity. It’s cool to see a working harbor,” Pike said of the ride, during which he often sees paddle boarders, kayakers and swimmers. He said the perception of both the Hudson and East rivers is evolving.
“People have a stigma the water is dirty. I think that is changing,” he said. “It’s not a dirty waterway.”
His new routine has “been a game-changer,” said Pike, whose wife, Caroline, is a physician at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. “It’s the best commute in the world.”
The scenery ain’t bad, either.
“I pass Staten Island. I pass Manhattan on the left,” Pike said. “I pass cruise ships and tourist boats.”
State officials could not say exactly how many people in New York are registered as Jet Ski operators because they are classified, along with boats, as watercraft.
Registration totals fluctuate year-to-year depending on when owners are required to renew their registration. The state Department of Motor Vehicles said in 2019 there were 356,859 watercraft registered.
At low tide, Pike has even laid claim to his own private oasis — a sliver of sandbar where he can stand about 650 feet from the south side of the Statue of Liberty.
“For me, the water is a way of life,” said Pike. “People need to see the vantage point of the city from New York Harbor.
“I couldn’t be happier.” A deranged West Virginia man who cops say sparked pandemonium by placing a pair of rice cookers inside a lower Manhattan subway station sought treatment for his mental illness two days earlier — only to be turned away, his brother said Sunday.
“He called me saying he tried to get in a psych ward, but they refused him. He was really upset,” Jason Griffin, 44, told the Daily News of his kid brother Larry Griffin II. “He said, ‘They don’t think I have problems.’ People expect you to be disheveled or talking to yourself, but some people have deeper problems.”
Instead, the younger, hopeless Griffin, 26, returned to the streets, ultimately allegedly placing what looked like a pair of bombs at the Fulton St. subway station about 7:30 a.m. on Friday. The NYPD’s bomb squad later determined that the rice cookers were not a threat.
Jason Griffin didn’t know what hospital psych ward his brother tried to check into.
Cops nabbed Griffin (inset), passed out from a drug overdose, at a home in Woodstock, the Bronx, on Saturday. He was arraigned early Sunday on charges of placing a false bomb and ordered held on $200,000 bail.
“He really needs help,” Jason Griffin said. “Prison would create a beast. He doesn’t belong there.”
He said his brother moved to the city by himself from the heart of coal-mining country in the spring, despite his warnings.
“You can’t control somebody else. I feel like I should’ve tied him to the couch,” the older brother said. “He’s highly ADD [afflicted with attention deficit disorder]. He’s never been medicated. … He was never treated.”
Jason Griffin added his brother called him frantically following the Friday ordeal asking for his advice. The older brother said he was in contact with an FBI agent as the agency hunted his brother and praised the feds’ handling of the case. “I said, ‘Just please don’t shoot him. He’s unarmed. He just has mental illness,’ ” Griffin said.