Suspects in cop shooting returned to BrooklynPosted by Staten Island Advance July 12, 2007 4:34PM
Categories: Breaking News
The first suspect was done in by a greasy fingerprint on a fast-food fried chicken carton left inside a stolen car.
The second and third were betrayed by empty tuna cans and cracker wrappers in the Pennsylvania woods.
As a Staten Island cop lay on the brink of death, the 78-hour manhunt for three men suspected of ambushing him and his partner on a Brooklyn street ended yesterday when Robert Ellis was taken into custody in a rural swath off the junction of Interstate 80 and Interstate 380 in the Poconos.
The 34-year-old convicted felon -- who police say shot NYPD Officer Russell Timoshenko, 23, during a traffic stop Monday -- was found sitting against a tree shortly before 8 a.m. He apparently had "hunkered down" in the same spot all night, snacking on peanut butter and crackers as a tactical squad used thermal imaging cameras to search for him, Pennsylvania police said.
"At first he had his hood over his head. I said, 'Let me see your hands!' at gunpoint," said Danny Potucek, an inspector with the U.S. Marshals assigned to the New York-New Jersey Regional Fugitive Task Force, who was the first to spot Ellis yesterday morning.
Potucek repeated himself three times before Ellis responded, raising his arms: "I don't have a gun, don't hurt me, don't hurt me."
Ellis' arrest came nearly 12 hours after his alleged accomplice, Dexter Bostic, also 34 and a convicted felon, was tackled after a brief chase on a wooded median nearby.
Both suspects were brought to Brooklyn's 71st Precinct stationhouse yesterday after waiving extradition and are expected to be arraigned this afternoon in Brooklyn Criminal Court on a slew of charges, including two counts each of attempted murder and assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon.
The first suspect, Lee Woods, 29, was arraigned in Brooklyn on Wednesday.
Woods was arrested in Queens on Tuesday, around the same time that police picked up the trail of his two cohorts in northeastern Pennsylvania. They were tipped off by a Queens man who said he drove the two there after the shooting, leaving from Bostic's Queens home early Monday, Kelly said.
The driver took the fugitives on a circuitous route through Long Island to Bridgeport, Conn., and then to Tarrytown, N.Y., Kelly said. There, the group stopped and bought tuna fish, crackers, peanut butter and water, before heading to the Poconos. The driver dropped them off on a rural road about 14 miles from where they were eventually caught.
Another driver on I-80 called police after spotting the two suspects walking along the interstate sometime Wednesday. An attendant at a rest stop along I-80 also recognized Ellis and Bostic, who stopped there to ask for change to make a phone call.
During a search of the area near the rest stop later that day, police found Bostic and Ellis hiding in a waist-high thicket, at the end of a trail of muddy footprints and discarded food containers, Kelly said. While Ellis managed to elude capture, running into the woods, the heavyset and lumbering Bostic quickly became winded when he tried to do the same.
"I'm too old to run," he allegedly said, before he slowed down and was tackled by a police officer.
Potucek said there was a sense of exuberance after Ellis was collared, especially after many of the more than 100 officers involved in the massive search had been up for 30 hours straight.
But it was tempered by the grave condition of Timoshenko, a Bay Terrace resident who continued to fight for his life in Kings County Hospital. Brooklyn Assistant District Attorney Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi ticked off the young cop's extensive injuries -- brain damage, paralysis, inability to breathe on his own -- during Woods' arraignment.
"The swelling has gone down somewhat in his face, but in essence he remains in the same condition in which he arrived here at the hospital, which is of course extremely serious," Kelly said during a press conference outside the hospital yesterday.
Authorities alleged that Bostic and Ellis were riding in a stolen BMW sport utility vehicle driven by Woods when it was pulled over by police early Monday morning in Brooklyn.
As Officers Herman Yan, 26, and Timoshenko approached either side of the vehicle, Bostic shot Timoshenko in the neck and face with a .45-caliber pistol and Ellis fired on Yan with a 9mm semiautomatic handgun, police said. Woods was allegedly loading a Tec9 pistol, which was not fired.
Yan, hit in the chest, was saved by his bulletproof vest.
At a hearing in Monroe County Municipal Court yesterday afternoon, Ellis and Bostic were shackled using the handcuffs carried by the two officers. Standing side by side, with dozens of uniformed police looking on, the two quietly answered a series of questions from Judge Ronald Vican before being whisked back to New York in a convoy of unmarked vehicles.
Investigators are also looking into whether the three suspects could be linked to other violent crimes using the same guns recovered from Monday's shooting, the police commissioner said. Ballistics linked one of the weapons to a drive-by shooting a day earlier, in which the shooter was in a Porsche taken from the same lot where the SUV was stolen and where Bostic had worked.
Police also are eyeing Bostic as a suspect in the unsolved murder of a salesman at a Long Island dealership earlier this year, in which the 27-year-old victim was shot in the back at closing time.
"Part of the investigation is that we are obviously looking at other crimes. ...We are doing an examination of other robberies that have taken place over the past several months to see if they've been involved either individually or jointly,' Kelly said, adding police expect to get a full history of the weapons soon.
Both Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg also expressed their thanks to the officers who helped to catch the suspects, and reminded the public to pray for Timoshenko.
"I hope the fact that the suspects are now in custody and on their way to facing justice in New York City will provide some small measure of relief to the Timoshenko family during this terribly difficult time," Bloomberg said.
- Contributed by John Annese, on location in Pennsylvania, and Peter N. Spencer
Watch a video of cops transporting Robert Ellis.