The NYPD still dogged by Moose’s grieving owner
If the Adams administration had it together, you’d already be reading about the incredible new project of a great New York storyteller instead of reading, again, about the man still apparently living in Prospect Park 11 weeks after throwing a bottle of urine at Jessica Chrustic and then beating her dog Moose with a stick so that he died days later.
But his cops in the 78th Precinct don’t have it together and are either incapable or uninterested in doing their jobs, and early on Friday morning, the same man tried to attack Chustic again.
The woman who witnessed Chrustic’s assault in August happened to see him a little before 7 a.m. She called 911 and then called Chrustic, who raced out of her apartment to try and find him, assuming the police would also be on their way to finally arrest this disturbed, sometimes violent, well-known man with a distinctive appearance who regularly threatens women and who beat another woman’s dog three years ago.
Indeed, Chrustic found him just outside of the park and tried to follow at a safe distance as he walked back into it, trying to discreetly keep him in sight as the police she expected to arrive at any moment had previously instructed her to do if she saw him, only for the man to turn toward her and get visibly agitated.
He then took out a can of pepper spray and started spraying it at her as she then tried to spray back from her own can, which proved to have a much more limited range.
He then walked out of the park with Chrustic following well behind him. Then, she told me later on Friday, he “came at me with a stick and the mace at full speed and I was sprinting down Garfield Place screaming ‘help!’ at the top of my lungs over and over” before another man happened to walk out of his door and Moose’s killer turned around and ran back toward the park.
When the police arrived about 10 minutes later, they took Churstic for a pointless ride around a bit of the Slope and that was apparently that.
I’m pretty sure Mayor Adams and his team are asking about these embarrassing headlines and getting told that maybe the veterinarian really killed Moose and there’s no charge worth bringing against this emotionally disturbed person who’d just be released the same day, and anyway we’ve done a bunch of driving around looking for him on behalf of this pain-in-the-butt Park Slope lady who keeps telling us how to do police work, getting in the way and whining to the press.
Of course, she wouldn’t be doing any of that if the police had arrested the man who killed Moose and has now assaulted Chrustic two times in the last three months.
If Adams and his crew think there’s “no harm, no foul” here and no reason to press precinct cops to stop hiding behind officious language and actually walk around and find this guy, it’s going to take a lot more than the hastily announced “public safety summit” at Gracie Mansion on Saturday to change the “perception” that the mayor is now blaming on the newspapers that things are “out of control.”
Back to that great New York storyteller I mentioned at the top. Mark Jacobson’s work inspired the TV show “Taxi” and was the basis of the movie ”American Gangster.” He’s incapable of writing a boring story or even a sentence.
But Jacobson recently decided to stop writing for magazines and tell tales on his own terms, going through 50 years of his notebooks to create with a crew of collaborators something he’s calling “The Suitcase Opens” that’s debuting on Tuesday at the Kraine Theater in the East Village, just below the KGB Bar.
It’s a captivating combination of film, live theater and journalism accompanied by music from the likes of jazz giant Matthew Shipp and John Langford and Sally Timmons of the Mekons.
There’s an animation about the Little Albert Experiment, where the American psychologist who created behavioral psychology and his research assistant and later second wife experimented on an 11-month-old, giving the infant a mouse to play with and then ringing a gong to terrify him until he became afraid of everything white or furry to “prove” Pavlov’s principles could also apply to humans before the adults’ affair forced them out of the academy and led him to a hugely successful second career in advertising.
And the story of the brilliant jazz trumpeter Buck Clayton’s youthful sojourn to Shanghai as a leader of the “Harlem Gentlemen,” where the handsome and talented young man collaborated with Li Jinhui, the “Father of Chinese popular music” — on music that was never recorded but will be performed on Tuesday — before leaving China after a fight with an American ex-con.
There’s much more weird, awesome, captivating stuff — a reminder that telling a good story is the best way to arrive at more stories worth telling.
