Maniac in killing of EMT Arroyo is unfit for trial; off to psych hospital

After five years of hearings and delays, a Bronx judge said Thursday the accused killer of beloved FDNY emergency medical technician Yadira Arroyo is not mentally fit to stand trial.

The decision by Bronx Supreme Court Judge Martin Marcus came as a blow to Arroyo’s family, friends and co-workers who’ve been waiting for justice since March 2017, when police say Jose Gonzalez ran down and killed the devoted EMT with her own ambulance in the Bronx.

“We had hoped to try the defendant in a court of law. The defendant will be sent to a psychiatric facility until he is deemed fit to stand trial,” Bronx D.A. Darcel Clark said in a statement Thursday. “This by no means is the end of this prosecution. The family and community can take some comfort that he will be off the streets and unable to harm anyone, until such time we can bring him to trial.”

The 44-year-old EMT’s family members and fellow medics have routinely attended the more than 50 hearings on Gonzalez’s mental competency. Dueling mental health evaluations by experts for the prosecution and the defense found him both fit and unfit to stand trial.

“It’s another gut punch to EMS as to how there’s no justice,” Oren Barzilay, president of FDNY EMS union, Local 2507, told the Daily News Thursday night. “Our sister was killed on television — it was videotaped. When is the system going to protect us?”

Barzilay said the fight isn’t over, but that means Arroyo’s family will have to keep living through the legal nightmare of waiting for a trial.

Arroyo, the mother of five sons, was killed on March 16, 2017, when Gonzalez, 30, who admitted he was high on PCP, jumped on the rear bumper of her ambulance in Soundview around 7:30 p.m.

She got out to investigate, and he bolted to the driver’s seat, threw the ambulance in reverse and backed over Arroyo, then put the vehicle in drive and ran over her a second time.

An off-duty MTA police officer a witnesses tackled him as he tried to flee.

In one 2019 hearing, prosecutors argued that Gonzalez boasted in a recorded phone call, “I can get by and I can go to the hospital and I can beat the case.” But during a psychiatric evaluation last year he claimed the Illuminati were involved in Arroyo’s death.