The suspect in last week’s shooting.
The East Village’s commanding officer gave a gut-wrenching account last night of how a 39-year-old man was fatally hit by a tire swing in Tompkins Square Park.
“It’s a terrible tragedy” said Deputy Inspector Peter J. Venice at a monthly Community Council meeting, describing how the Harlem man was playing with his four-year-old niece and swinging the tire Monday afternoon. It had metal in it and struck him in the face.
The man, identified by a police spokesperson as Aleim Perkins, was taken to Beth Israel Medical Center “where he passed away,” Venice said.
At the brief monthly meeting at the East Fifth Street station house, Venice said crime overall was down by 7 percent in the Ninth Precinct for the year 2014. He also reported on the shooting of a 19-year-old on Friday at the Lillian Wald Houses on Avenue D. “It was not a random shooting but part of an ongoing dispute,” the commanding officer said. He noted that that that a suspect had been identified and “we expect an arrest shortly.”
There were a couple of references to the Eric Garner protests, one from an elderly woman who said she barely got through a crowd of cops that massed on Monday near the post office on Fourth Avenue.
A tall man with a thick accent, who declined to be identified, blasted demonstrators for “making noise” and “blocking traffic,” claiming they were getting sympathetic treatment in the media. “People who break the law are portrayed as victims and police are portrayed as bad guys,” he said. “This is not right, this is upside-down. We should support the police.”