A woman arrested for mowing down a man sitting on his walker on a Queens sidewalk while trying to run over a rival was taken away in an ambulance Tuesday after she started screaming incoherently at cops.
Kiani Phoenix is expected to undergo a psychiatric evaluation after she wigged out as her arrest was being processed inside the 101st Precinct stationhouse in Far Rockaway.
Phoenix, 26, wearing an Aaliyah T-shirt, was supposed to be taken to Queens Criminal Court to be arraigned, but that will be delayed while she’s hospitalized.
Phoenix’s unintelligible rant was so loud ,it could be heard outside the stationhouse before she was brought outside. But when she saw news reporters and photographers gathered on the sidewalk, she clammed up, trying to cover her face with a sweatshirt as she quietly stepped into the ambulance.
She’s accused of fatally striking Milton Storch, 59, on Saturday while trying to kill a woman she’d just exchanged blows with.
“I’m glad they caught her,” Storch’s roommate, Jose Rodriguez, said of the arrest. “What she did wasn’t right.”
Storch was just a couple blocks from his home sitting outside a deli he frequented on Beach 20th St. near New Haven Ave. in Far Rockaway when Phoenix got into an argument with her 27-year-old rival about 7:15 a.m., police said.
Phoenix got into her car, jumped the sidewalk and aimed to hit the woman with her car but instead hit Storch, according to cops.
Heartbreaking surveillance video shows bystanders scatter, but Storch could not move quickly enough.
After Phoenix allegedly struck Storch, she reversed into a 37-year-old man walking behind her car, police said.
Medics rushed both men to St. John’s Hospital, where Storch died. The younger man had minor back injuries, cops said.
“It’s been quiet, real quiet,” Rodriguez, 58, said of Storch’s absence. “He left the world … and what can I say?”
Joseph Cruz, who previously lived with the victim in an assisted living facility, remembered him as having a “heart of gold.”
“He was a great person,” said Cruz, 56. “Never stayed still, he always walked around.”
Storch had worked as a forklift operator at a Queens warehouse before suffering back and hip complications and moving into assisted living.
After moving out of the assisted living facility, he regularly visited his friends there, joining residents on fishing trips, Cruz said.
Storch “always took that bus … come hang with us for a couple hours,” Cruz said. “From there, he’d go back home.”
The victim often brought his old friends coffee and spoke about a nephew he adored.
“They talked about getting to see each other again,” Cruz said. “Been awhile.”
Phoenix was arrested Monday and charged with murder, attempted murder, assault, reckless endangerment and criminal possession of a weapon.
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