Bone-chilling details
Dead fridge guy is linked to dual slay
It went from cold case to cold case.
The disturbed man who sprang out of a walk-in refrigerator at an Upper West Side restaurant and then died while attacking staff was arrested last year in a 30year-old double homicide in Boston, officials said Monday.
Slay suspect Carlton Henderson had been sprung without bail in the murder case Aug. 1, when a Beantown judge ruled that incriminating comments he once made couldn’t be used as evidence against him, court papers show. He still faced trial.
After his release, Henderson, 54, made his way to New York City — and, somehow, into the fridge at hopping brunch spot Sarabeth’s on Amsterdam Avenue near West 80th Street.
“Away from me, Satan!” he yelled as a worker opened up the fridge around 11 a.m. Sunday and he sprang out.
Henderson ran into the kitchen, grabbed a knife and started threatening staff, cops said.
Workers were able to disarm Henderson, but during the struggle, he suffered some sort of medical episode and died, cops said.
The exact cause of death is still to be determined — as are how, when and why he got into the fridge.
“We believe he was going to steal something out of the freezer and got locked in,” said a highranking police source.
On Monday, Sarabeth’s was open and doing a brisk business. Workers there declined to address the bizarre incident.
Henderson was jailed in Arizona in 1993 on drug and gun charges and, while in prison, tried to barter information he had about a San Diego-to-Boston narcotics ring in exchange for a reduced sentence, according to court documents.
Henderson claimed to have intel on the fatal May 1988 shootings of William Medina, 26, and Antonio Dos Reis, 22, in Boston, the papers state.
He pinned the slayings on two men, but one of them was mur- dered in Miami that same year and the other was killed by police in Los Angeles the next. With no one to prosecute, the proposed deal was shelved and essentially forgotten as Henderson did his time.
Then in 2014, a relative of one of the Boston victims asked cops about the still-unsolved case and they agreed to revisit it. By this time, Henderson was out of prison. New ballistics testing on a gun used in a Miami murder soon led probers to Henderson in the double-slay case, Boston cops said, according to a Fox TV affiliate. Henderson was nabbed in St. Louis last year, extradited to Boston and charged with the murders.