‘Scary’ roomm a te held in blade s la y
Pulitzer scribe Franks, wife of Morgy, dies
Before a Harlem man was charged with killing a homeless man on his stoop, he was a roommate from hell, the stunned woman who rented him a room told the Daily News.
Dustin Loyd is accused of fatally stabbing Thomas Currie outside his building on Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. and W. 113th St. at 4:05 a.m. on April 26.
Six months earlier, Loyd allegedly threatened Lilia Mears inside her apartment, where he rented a room. When Mears confronted him about leaving because he’d become unfriendly, he lashed out, she said.
‘You’re in my house and you have to talk to me,’ ” Mears told him at the entrance to his room, with her hand on the door frame.
“‘Move your hand, or I’m going to slam the door down on your hand!,’ ” Loyd allegedly replied. “Then he grabbed my hand really hard and threw me against the wall,” Mears recounted. The 66-year-old was treated for bumps and bruises at a nearby hospital and claims she called the police. Loyd was not arrested.
Mears, who travels back and forth to Seattle, said she met Loyd last summer, when he was part of a work crew near her home.
Shaken by a recent burglary and not wanting to live alone, Mears asked Loyd if he knew of anyone looking for a room. “He seemed very nice, and I fell for everything he told me,” Mears explained.
Loyd’s about-face came shortly after Mears left the city to stay with her husband in Seattle. Mears said Loyd stopped answering her calls, and when she returned to the apartment, he barely spoke to her at all.
“In September, I told him, ‘You have to leave,’ ” she said.
He didn’t.
Seven months later, Loyd was seen on surveillance footage “lunging” toward Currie with a knife. The homeless man fell to the ground clutching his torso, authorities said.
Cops found Currie lying in a pool of blood. He was rushed to Mount Sinai Morningside hospital, where he died.
Now in Seattle with her husband, Mears was horrified to hear about what Loyd is accused of doing.
“This is all just scary, and it’s really sad,” she said.
Lucinda Franks, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who wrote a loving memoir about her marriage to the late Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau, died Wednesday at age 74.
Franks died at the family farm in Hopewell Junction, Dutchess County, after a long battle with cancer, her family said.
Franks started out in journalism at United Press International, where she began her career in 1968.
Two years later, she was covering the radical Weather Underground group in New York City. She and fellow UPI reporter Thomas Powers won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for their five-part series on a member of the leftist group killed in a explosion in 1970 while building bombs in a Greenwich Village townhouse.
Franks was the first woman to be awarded a Pulitzer for national reporting. She later joined The New York Times, and she also wrote for the New Yorker, New York magazine and other outlets.
Franks wrote a memoir “Timeless: Love, Morgenthau, and Me” about her unlikely match with the top prosecutor.