After an hours-long search, officials finally tracked down an escaped fugitive who escaped federal custody in Brooklyn Wednesday.
The suspect was able to sneak away while he was on his way to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Sunset Park in the late afternoon. Local resident Stefanie Tatsis said she spotted the suspect outside her relative’s home just before 4 p.m. She called 911, telling them she saw a suspicious man in the back yard, looking like he was trying to break into the home.
Soon after, Tatsis took matters into her own hands.
“By the time I looked back up, he was already on our balcony, so I chased with a meat cleaver to get him away from the house, only because my two nephews were in the house,” she said.
The man ran off, still eluding police. Officers blocked off the neighborhood as other put on tactical gear while the manhunt continued.
Chopper 4 showed images from above as the intense search was underway, with dozens of cops searching for one man.
Another resident, Terry Pierson, said that five different sets of police searched his apartment on 26th Street with dogs and other equipment, and found nothing. But he later made a disturbing find, after noticing an odd shape under a dustcover.
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“I reached over with the flashlight … and there’s a person sitting there, and I went running out my backyard where there were three cops yelling ‘he’s in there, he’s in there!’” said Pierson. He said the suspect broke in through a back screen door, and then tried to make his escape out the front door where police tackled him.
The young man, 19-year-old Jhonny Soto, was hauled off by police after the long search. Soto had been wanted for having an illegal firearm with the serial number filed off, and was also being investigated by Nassau County Police as a suspect in a stolen Jeep case.
