Results tagged “man”

A minivan covered with parking tickets and debris had been sitting on 34th Avenue under the BQE overpass for long enough that a city marshal was finally dispatched to have the 2000 Chevrolet Ventura towed on Wednesday morning. But a grisly surprise was waiting inside: The badly decomposed corpse of a 59-year-old man, who apparently died from a heart attack, at least according to his daughter. Sources tell the Daily News that the deceased driver, a diabetic handyman named George Morales, was homeless, but his 29-year-old daughter Jennifer insists he lived with her and her two kids in Washington Heights. She says she called police after he went missing last month, but the NYPD claims they have no record of a missing person report. There's probably more to this story, but for now all we know are the disturbing details Morales shares with the News: "The window was cracked open. I don't understand how no one noticed him. They just gave him tickets. In the autopsy, they said they just found skeletal remains, no organs, only his heart." She believes he had a heart attack.

Little is publicly known about 34-year-old Ashish Shah of Jersey City at this time, but police say his life ended Sunday morning in the trash compactor of The Olivia, a luxury apartment building near Penn Station. A building employee tells the Post that for the second time in as many days, Shah had arrived outside The Olivia in a taxi and ran inside without paying. Police believe Shah had been "drinking for several hours" before his death, and It's unclear who, if anyone, Shah knew in the building. But just before 6 a.m. he was observed dashing past the doorman to the elevators. Cops say he took an elevator to the 36th-floor roof level, but after his attempt to get to the sun deck tripped an alarm, Shah took the stairs down to the 35th floor, where he somehow fell into a narrow garbage chute, plummeting to the garbage compactor 28 stories below. One resident tells the Daily News, "It's amazing that someone could fit in that hole."

Robert McDonald, a 60-year-old Scottish man, faces a year in prison after acting out every delayed passenger's fantasy aboard a grounded Delta flight Sunday night. The plane had been stalled on the taxiway for two and a half hours due to inclement weather (after a layover between Edinburgh and Vegas), and it seems all that waiting put the zap on old McDonald's head. At some point around 7:45 p.m., he snapped and allegedly tried to make a break for it by popping open the emergency exit!

The family of an emotionally disturbed man who fell ten feet to his death after being Tasered by a cop has now filed a lawsuit, surprising no one. You'll recall, with attendant wave of revulsion, that after the incident made headlines last September, the NYPD admitted that the use of the stun gun appeared to violate department guidelines. Then the grief-stricken lieutenant who ordered the Tasering committed suicide. It was a horrible story all around, complete with grisly video. And according to the AP, the family of the victim, Iman Morales, isn't just suing the city, the NYPD, and two officers involved in the incident—they're also suing the estate of the officer who committed suicide. They're seeking $10 million in damages; a spokesperson for the city law department called it "a very tragic case."

Mayor Bloomerg (pictured) expressed dismay yesterday over a jury's recent decision to award $2.3 million to 25-year-old Dustin Dibble, who lost part of his right leg under a subway train after falling drunk onto the tracks in 2006. Hizzoner told reporters, "I wasn't sitting in the courtroom. I wasn't on the jury. But on the face of it, you'd think there's a personal responsibility here. And I think a lot of us should be a little more responsible for our own behavior." There he goes again with the responsibility lecture. First, nobody's allowed to smoke, then we all have to confront our calorie intake, now we can't sue the city when we get hurt ourselves stumbling around blotto? If the Mayor doesn't want New Yorkers to drink to excess, shouldn't he just ban booze? Otherwise, how will we know right from wrong? Also, as Dibble's lawyer tells the Post, "This was a preventable accident. The operator himself said he could have stopped." But he didn't because he mistook Dibble for a trash heap. Meanwhile, the Daily News notes that NYC Transit paid out nearly $50 million last year in personal injury lawsuits brought by its riders, a jump of nearly 40% from 2004.

Police say Keyleste Williams was drunk when he returned to his 6th floor Brooklyn apartment on Sunday morning around 3 a.m., got into a vicious argument with his sister, and threw his cousin Lateya's cat Shadow out the window. Shadow's (not pictured) fatal fall was heard by a neighbor, who only heard a loud thump and told the Post, "I thought it was bricks. I didn't know it was a cat. Oh, my God." Police charged Williams, 29, with aggravated cruelty to animals, plus torturing and injuring animals. But Lateya says her family doesn't want to press charges because he was intoxicated when he dangled the cat out the window and let go, "We just don't want him to come back home for a while...I would just want God to charge him." Related: The ASPCA on cats and falls—cats "may actually be at greater risk for injury when falling shorter distances... Shorter distances do not give them enough time to adjust their body posture to fall correctly."

Rescuers responding to a 911 call Sunday night from Long Island shut-in David Schock, 57, were forced to cut a hole in the wall of his mobile home to remove him. Andrew Donnelly at the local fire department tells Newsday, "He definitely wasn't coming out through the door." Because Schock weighs over 600 pounds, at least 10 firefighters—wearing plastic suits because there was fecal matter in the house—were needed to hoist him onto a custom-built wooden backboard and slide him through the hole. A neighbor says Schock got around his mobile home on a wooden box affixed with wheels, adding that "he did everything on his computer but he couldn't move." It apparently took him two days to reach his phone on Sunday evening to call for help after falling. A sad story, but it still doesn't top the woman who got stuck to the toilet seat after two years on the throne.

One morning in August, an unidentified 28-year-old woman who caught a man taking cellphone photos up her skirt as she climbed the subway stairs decided to retaliate. “Since he is taking pictures of me, I am going to take pictures of him,” she tells the Times. She followed him onto the 1 train and told him to smile as she took his picture, because she intended to call the police. Fast-forward to Tuesday, when an NYPD officer approached a man matching the photograph. It was one Aaron Olivieri, age 36. He told the cop, “I hope I am not the person you are looking for,” and then admitted he knew why police were looking for him. He was arraigned Wednesday on misdemeanor charges of unlawful surveillance, attempted sexual abuse and harassment. The Times article also gives a shout-out to Holla Back, a blog where women share their horrible experiences with perverted men in New York, a city that seems to be crawling with 'em.

A photographer with the AP snapped this shot of a local entrepreneur prospecting for coins in the City Hall fountain. The Post has no details about how much the individual raked in, or how much hepatitis he picked up, but an NYPD spokesman says that, unlike Italy, it's actually perfectly legal to submerge oneself in the city's fountains to gather change and steal all the heartfelt wishes and prayers attached to them. And what about the maintenance workers who presumably use all the coins for a year-end pizza party? They have only themselves to blame for not diving in there sooner; this is NYC, baby. As E.B. White wrote, "No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky." Unidentified fountain dredger, we salute you!

Women in heels and skirts know to steer clear of sidewalk subway gratings, as do most people averse to fetid gusts of air from beneath the city’s streets. But sometimes when you’re rushing down a crowded sidewalk, you take your chances. And sometimes you fall in, as happened this morning to a man who crashed through a subway grate at the corner of Willoughby Avenue and Marcy in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The victim was rescued and taken to Kings County Hospital; the extent of his injuries is unclear, but last year a woman fell through a sidewalk grate on 52nd Street and lived to tell the terrifying tale.

Yesterday a 22-year-old mail clerk at the law firm Chadbourne & Parke, located in the G.E. building at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, got his head stuck in the mailroom conveyor belt. Ouch! here's no word yet on just how the unidentified man's head got caught in the machinery, but the Sun reports he’s now in critical condition at Bellevue. OSHA was called in to look at the belt, which was "shut down as a precaution."

A 55-year-old man fell onto the subway tracks at Delancey Street yesterday just as the F train was pulling into the station – and survived by lying down in the disgusting shallow trough between the rails. The unidentified man became suddenly ill and fell onto the tracks at 1:34 p.m, but this time there was no hero to jump in and pull him out. The motorman on the incoming train hit the emergency brakes when he spotted the man, but three cars had passed over him by the time the train came to a stop.

Health officials say his death was caused by a hardened resin, made partly from venom collected from toads of the Bufo genus, which contains chemicals called “bufadienolides” known to disrupt heart rhythms. The aphrodisiac is supposed to be applied topically, not eaten, but authorities warn that even that use can be harmful.

Say goodbye to the maddening ear-poison of Kool Man’s “Pop Goes the Weasel,” and harken back to the more civilized jingle of a bygone era: the gently ringing bell of the retro Good Humor ice cream truck. On Sunday Adam Kuban got the scoop of the week when he happened upon this atavistic enabler of sweet teeth outside the Museum of Modern Art.

Anyone who’s ever declared, “You couldn’t pay me to eat at Caliente Cab Company” should consider the case of Khadijah Farmer, whose humiliating experience at the West Village tourist trap netted her $35,000 today. While patronizing the restaurant after the Gay Pride parade last year, Farmer was ousted from the ladies room by the bouncer, who interrupted her while she was on the toilet because he thought she was a he.