“At approximately 7:30 a.m., PSD officers observed a female vandalizing 2 vehicles in front of 22 North Loop Road,” the RIOC press release said. Okay, fair enough, but then, it got weird.
by David Stone
The Roosevelt Island Daily News
RIOC Communications Director Bryant Daniels tells a story about an incident yesterday, July 24th, on Roosevelt Island. However strange it appears to be true, as follows.
“When they (PSD) attempted to apprehend her, she fled toward the river and jumped over the west sea wall… where she stood on the rocky coast before entering the East River up to her knees.”
Escaping Into a Watery Hell: The East River
Here in The Daily’s newsroom. We found it hard to believe. We did some research. In the vault, we found this from Seinfeld:
On the hit TV series in 1997, Kramer takes a swim in the East River and lives to tell the story. This is fiction, of course. There are no known survives of extended soaking in this open sewer.
Challenging This Version of Events
Skeptics that we are, we challenged Daniels’s claim that :”NYPD was able to remove the woman from the water.”
First of all, that’s not water. It’s a liquid, yes, but the same as what comes out of your kitchen tap or roars over Niagara Falls? Quoting Joe Biden, “Come on, man…”
We demanded that Daniels “…verify that there was no dissolving…”
The official response: “I cannot verify that.”
Finally…
The truth is elusive here. Was this woman a vandal or chimera able to breathe normal air yet rest safely in the waters surrounding Roosevelt Island like a protective moat?
“She was transported to the hospital for evaluation,” Daniels concludes.
No kidding?
A Different Kind of Bet
For years, Roosevelt Island did not behave like a system constrained by limits. Internally, the budget was often treated less as a boundary and more as a reservoir to be used.
