G. Central ‘gunman’ is busted
‘Unprovoked’ attack: DA
Next stop, Central Booking. A Queens man was arrested and charged with attempted murder on Monday in the “unprovoked and inexplicable” shooting of a commuter on a Grand Central Terminal subway platform.
Tearance Crumpty, 26, who was arrested at a Queens hotel that houses the homeless, was also charged with first-degree assault and weapons possession in the random Saturday-morning attack on David Altamirano, 40.
Altamirano was on his way to his job at Kesté Pizza & Vino in the Financial District when police said Crumpty followed him on the 4-train platform and shot him in the arm before fleeing.
“He called me the morning of the shooting around 10:30 a.m. to tell me, ‘Please cover me because I was shot,’ ” the pizzeria’s owner, Roberto Caporuscio, recalled Monday. “And I said, ‘You’re kidding me.’ ”
“He told me he was looking for his phone and a guy was following him,” Caporuscio said. “He didn’t know this person. The guy kept following him, and David said, ‘If you don’t stop following me, I’ll call the police.’ And the guy shot him.”
Altamirano, a father of two, had worked at the pizza parlor for 10 years and is “an incredible worker,” Caporuscio said.
On Sunday, police released surveillance video of the suspected assailant leaving the station with a red bandanna covering his face.
On Monday, cops busted Crumpty at the Fairfield Inn Hotel near La Guardia Airport, where the city transferred nearly 100 people from a Bronx homeless shelter in June.
Crumpty was arraigned in Manhattan hours later.
“The defendant was identified after a tip when surveillance footage of him was released, and when police officers took him into custody, a revolver similar to the one recorded in the shooting was recovered in his pocket,” Manhattan Assistant District Attorney Courtney Razner said.
“The defendant also admitted to detectives that he shot someone in the train station.”
Razner called the shooting “an unprovoked and inexplicable assault.”
Crumpty, who has two open cases in Brooklyn, pleaded with Judge Anne Swern to release him without bail, assuring her, “I’m not that type of person.”
“Judge, I really can’t make bail at all,” Crumpty said. “I don’t have no money for that. I really will come back to court.”
Swern set bail at $200,000 cash or $600,000 bond.