Fired hard hat kills boss and self
Pals knew of his plan but didn’t alert cops
If only someone had called cops, a life might have been saved.
A disgruntled hard hat — who had blabbed to neighbors for days about planning to kill the boss who fired him — stormed onto a Midtown construction site Thursday and fatally gunned down the man before taking his own life.
At about 7:10 a.m., Samuel Perry rushed onto the West 59th Street high-rise site where he had been fired and shot foreman Christopher Sayers point-blank in the head on the 37th floor, police said.
Perry then fled to the fifth floor and turned the 9mm semiautomatic weapon on himself, cops said. His body was found more than an hour later.
Perry, 44, of Far Rockaway, Queens, had made no secret of his plot for revenge. He had told friends and neighbors about retaliating after Sayers, 37, of Farmingdale, LI, canned him from the luxury high-rise development project near the West Side Highway.
“He’s been telling me. I was trying to talk him out of it. He got fired two days ago. It pushed him to his limits,” said Karinne Gale, 26, Perry’s next-door neighbor in Far Rockaway.
The concrete layer told “I’m going to take care of over life. It’s time to go.”
Cops at Perry’s home told The Post that early Thursday he texted his brother, stationed in Georgia with the military, indicating he was going to kill his boss and himself. The sibling immediately called police.
Gale admitted she hadn’t called police about Perry’s ominous remarks.
“He told me he’s going to do it today. I tried to text him early this morning,” she said, weeping.
Perry left behind a note where he complained about unfair treatment at work, sources said.
Colleagues described Perry as a “hothead,” according to police. He had been arrested three times, twice for assault and once for burglary. His last arrest was in 2015.
Construction at the site, where the ultra-luxe Waterline Square development is set to open in 2019, was shut down for the day.
In another warning sign, a day before the shootings, Perry tried to give his 13-month-old pit bull, Bruno, to a neighbor named Mike.
“He told me wanted to shoot the dog and bury him in the yard. I told him don’t do that,” Mike said.
Perry’s murder-suicide comes two years after he witnessed his wife’s gruesome death, according to neighbors, who said she doused herself with gasoline at their home and set herself ablaze.
“He told me she did it in the middle of the night. She came into his room and was calling his name,” Gale said.
Law-enforcement sources confirmed the neighbor’s account.