MANHATTAN
A Harlem man has been charged with murder in a fatal shooting last month, police said yesterday. William Green, 26, was picked up in an apartment on West 111th Street, where cops found a .38 caliber handgun. Green is charged with killing Jose Shomo during a Dec. 12 argument at Seventh Avenue and 147th Street. He pulled a gun and shot Shomo in the torso and hand, cops said. Shomo was taken to Harlem Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. In addition to murder, Green was also charged with criminal possession of a weapon.
A LaGuardia HS student celebrated his 17th birthday in a jail cell last night after being arrested on drug charges for selling marijuana-laced brownies to his schoolmates, police said.
Lee Friedman of Sunnyside, Queens, was collared after six out of almost 30 students who bought the brownies from him – at $8 a pop – complained of dizziness to the school nurse.
Friedman, an 11th-grader at the Upper West Side school, is also charged with endangering the welfare of a child, because several of the kids were under 17, cops said.
Two banks were robbed in separate incidents yesterday hours apart, police said. The first robbery occurred at a Chase branch at 1 Lincoln Plaza on West 63rd Street at 9 a.m. A man in his 20s, wearing a hood over his face, walked into the bank, passed a note demanding money to a teller and fled with cash. About four hours later, the second robbery took place at the Independence branch at 250 Lexington Ave. A man in his 50s fled with $1,000 after he entered the bank and repeated the act.
BROOKLYN
Two robbers – with at least one brandishing a gun – made off with cash from a bank yesterday in Crown Heights, an FBI spokesman said. The robbery occurred about 10:30 a.m. at the Banco Popular at 539 Eastern Parkway. Two men entered the bank and one of them fired a shot into the ceiling, vaulted over a counter and snatched an undetermined amount of money from a drawer. The robbers fled. No one was injured.
Two thugs robbed and pistol-whipped a woman on a subway in a Bedford-Stuyvesant station before fleeing with approximately $2,500 in cash, police said yesterday. The robbery occurred Thursday around 4 p.m. on a G train at the Bedford/Nostrand Avenue station. Two men accosted a 45-year-old woman and robbed and beat her with the butt of a pistol. The assailants fled. The victim, whose name was not released, was taken to Woodhull Hospital with a laceration to the head.
QUEENS
A thief fled empty-handed from a Forest Hills bank yesterday after he produced what appeared to be a gun and passed a note demanding money to a teller, police said. The attempted robbery occurred about 2 p.m. at the HSBC branch on 108th Street near 64th Road.
The medical examiner has ruled a homicide the death of a woman who slipped into a coma and died after an abortion in 1996. In September 1996, an abortion was performed on Francisca Gomez, 24, in a clinic at 92-11 Roosevelt Ave. Jackson Heights. Afterward, she stopped breathing and fell into a coma due to “extreme medical negligence,” according to ME spokesperson Ellen Borakove. Gomez was taken to Elmhurst General Hospital, where she stayed in a vegetative state until her death in June 2002. On Thursday, the medical examiner ruled the death a homicide after getting back the results of an autopsy. Police have made no arrests in the case.
Five youths have been arrested in the knifepoint robbery of a man in Long Island City, police said yesterday. The robbery occurred at noon on Thursday in front of an apartment building in Sunnyside. The five males, ages 15 to 20, accosted a 30-year-old man, pulled a knife and robbed him of an unknown amount of property. Anti-Crime Unit cops collared four of the suspects at the scene and the fifth at his home. All were charged with robbery.