MURDER IN NAKED CITY
Police and firefighters responding to a blaze in Harlem got two big shocks: one naked man guarding the door to the burning apartment and a second naked man stabbed dead inside.
Aljo Mrkulic, 31, was charged with the victim’s murder Saturday night.
Cops say he had tried to block first responders from entering apartment 9G at 409 E. 120th St. at about 4:20 a.m. Saturday, officials said.
Video shows cops and firefighters carrying the muscular Mrkulic face down by his limbs from the building as a crowd gathers on the sidewalk.
He wears nothing but the tattoo on his backside and the blood on his face.
“He started the fire! He tried to kill all of us here!” a woman says in the footage (which can be viewed online at nypost.com) as the man is strapped onto a stretcher and loaded into an ambulance. Another neighbor said the victim, too, was unclothed, and that fire alarms were going off on every floor of the building.
“There was a lot of blood in the hallway, a lot of blood all over the place. That freaked me out,” said the resident, 62, who declined to reveal his name. “People on the floor told me he ran to a neighbor’s door naked and they didn’t let him in. They said they heard some arguing going on in the apartment.”
Mrkulic was taken to Metropolitan Hospital in East Harlem for evaluation. He was charged with first-degree murder, arson and two counts of assaulting cops. The victim was identified late Saturday as building resident Christopher Rodriguez, 30.
At least four others were injured in the incident, one seriously, the FDNY said. A police officer was taken from the scene in an ambulance.
Evette Zayas, who owns nearby restaurant Cake Burgers said the building has had its share of problems but nothing like Saturday’s gruesome goings-on.
“It’s a low-income building with a lot of the people coming from shelters. Before the pandemic you had cops coming three or four times a day, but it was mostly for domestic violence,” she noted. “Once the shutdown started, it wasn’t like that anymore until this happened. It just hurt my heart.”