Charges have been dismissed against the wife of an Upper East Side doctor who claimed that his spouse tried to kill him after he ingested Viagra and became overly amorous.
Malcolm Schuey, a 72-year-old ear, nose and throat specialist, told the police that he awoke in his bed shortly after 2 a.m. on Jan. 19 to discover his 55-year-old wife, Roberta Bernstein, a New York City public school teacher, trying to suffocate him with a pillow. The doctor contended that he was able to escape that near-death experience by locking himself in the upstairs bathroom of their duplex apartment.
When he emerged the next morning, apparently believing that the coast was clear, his spouse allegedly attacked him again, placing him in a choke hold. During the altercation, the doctor (who, according to the New York Post, suffered a stroke last year) received a laceration to his lower left leg.
However, a police source suggested that the victim may have been at least partially responsible for the incident. “She didn’t want to suffocate him,” the officer said of Ms. Bernstein. “She just wanted to hold him down.”
Dr. Schuey and his wife have apparently patched things up, and he attended his wife’s arraignment. “He was there for her,” explained a law enforcement source. “This is not what it appeared to be.”
The case was dismissed, the source added, because “it was more of a family squabble than an attempted murder. God bless him at 72 is all I can say.”
She Said, He Said
Not only beauty but also crime is in the eye of the beholder-or so suggest a couple of assault complaints filed at the 19th Precinct on Jan. 28. The combatants were a 38-year-old man and a 21-year-old woman, who locked horns outside a nightclub on East 92nd Street shortly after 3 a.m. one morning.
According to the man, a resident of Tiemann Place in Manhattan, his assailant hit him over the head with a Heineken bottle. She also punched him in the mouth, causing a slight swelling to the inside of his lip. The man claimed that the altercation arose when he refused to give the lady $40 for what he described as “drug money.”
The woman told the cops a diametrically opposite tale: that she was the one assaulted by him-hit in the face with a closed fist, which gave her a broken nose and hematomas to the head. She ran back into the bar bloodied, recalls a witness, and stated that the man standing outside was responsible for her injuries.
The timing of the complaints seems to argue in the woman’s favor. She filed hers first, at 4:30 a.m., while her opponent, the police noted, didn’t mention to the officers responding to the scene that he’d also been assaulted, and only filed his complaint at 6:10 a.m.
Drugstore Cowboys
If at first you don’t succeed trying to rip off a drugstore without getting noticed, caution suggests not that you try, try again but instead that you leave the area immediately, as a hapless trio of thieves discovered to their misfortune on Jan. 19.
The group first tried their luck at a Duane Reade pharmacy at 63rd Street and Second Avenue, entering the location and helping themselves to items from several displays. When they were stopped by a store employee as they tried to leave the store, rather than throw themselves at his mercy and beg forgiveness (which sometimes works), they copped an attitude and informed him that they were “gonna put you out of your misery.”
When another employee tried to lock the front door to prevent them from departing, one of the perps pushed him out of the way and a second pulled a small handgun from a blue backpack, pointed it at the store’s manager and said, “I’ll put you to sleep.”
With that, the bandits were allowed to flee. However, rather than abandon their evening’s merriment at that point, they apparently took their successful flight from Duane Reade as incentive to try their luck at the CVS Pharmacy at 1223 Second Avenue.
The art of the steal seemed their motive rather than pocketing items that might appeal to the resale market, because the only things they filched were nine Combat roach traps.
When approached by store employees, the three attempted to flee-but with less success than they’d had at Duane Reade. One of them, a 15-year-old Brooklyn resident, was caught and handcuffed by a security guard without incident. A second thief, 17 years old, put up something of a struggle before he was successfully subdued by two employees, delivering one of them a laceration to his left hand. Their third accomplice, a 17-year-old Brooklyn resident, managed to get away, but not for long. The police found him on the southbound No. 6 train platform at Lexington Avenue and 68th Street. He was positively identified in a line-up at the 19th Precinct.
His buddies were also identified as having participated in the earlier Duane Reade robbery during a show-up that was conducted on the corner of Second Avenue and 64th Street at 9:05 p.m.
