Surrounded by morons

Rico says worse yet, arrow-wielding morons.
According to an article by James Barron and Al Baker (there's that Alan Baker again) in The New York Times, the cops finally found their man:

In the mid-19th century, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, I shot an arrow into the air, it fell to earth, I knew not where. The mystery facing the police this week was the opposite. They knew where the arrow landed on Sunday afternoon— in the abdomen of a woman standing in a nursing home driveway in Riverdale. What they did not know was who had shot it into the air.
After five days of searching rooftops, eyeing potential trajectories, and using a classic “good cop, bad cop” strategy, the answer they came up with was this: The arrow that struck the woman, Denise Delgado Brown, 51, came from the ramshackle house next to the nursing home that a plumber named Eric Collins was moving into. How Mr. Collins came to be there leads to a tale of that place in another time.
In 1949, Charles and Ethel Collins, already the parents of a two-year-old and living in a cramped apartment, had quadruplets. The newspapers said the four babies were the first quads in Bronx history. All four survived, and after a barrage of publicity, the Collinses moved into a brand-new house built with donated labor on donated land on Independence Avenue in Riverdale.
The Dionne quintuplets stopped by on their way to Gracie Mansion when they visited New York the following year. Then the Collinses faded from the headlines. The family had backyard cookouts. The parents voted at the nursing home after it was built in the 1980s. The quadruplets grew up, married, and had children of their own, one of whom was Eric Collins.
Nothing more was heard from 3001 Independence Avenue until Sunday. Then the arrow hit Ms. Brown, who was standing in the driveway of the Schervier Nursing Care Center next door. She had just dropped off a friend who lives at the home.
On Thursday, the police arrested Mr. Collins, 27, a plumber who works for the Westchester County parks department, on charges of assault, reckless endangerment, and weapons possession. The police said he had shot one of six arrows in his possession. “This is the freakiest thing I ever heard of, because he’s a family guy, a normal guy,” said Joe Amici, who owns a deli in Yonkers near the apartment that Mr. Collins was leaving. He said Mr. Collins was a regular customer, whose daily routine revolved around walking his dachshunds, going to work, and looking after his wife and eighteen-month-old daughter.
Mr. Collins was moving into the house that had been built for his grandparents— his grandmother, the mother of the quadruplets, died in December at 88. He had told his across-the-hall neighbor from the Yonkers apartment he was vacating that he wanted to look after his grandfather, who is 89. He also confided that, like his grandparents in 1949, he needed the space. His wife is in her second pregnancy.
The police said Mr. Collins was shuttling boxes in and out of the house on Sunday. Around 2 p.m., said Paul Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, “he stopped, picked up a bow and arrow, and shot it at the fence” separating his grandfather’s yard from the nursing home.
They police said that when it pierced the plastic fence about ten inches from the ground, its trajectory changed, putting it on a collision course with Ms. Brown. They said that Ms. Brown had not been a target, and that her being wounded was accidental.
Ms. Brown said on Monday that the arrow was in so deep that she decided not to risk pulling it out. She was taken to St. Barnabas Hospital for emergency surgery. A woman who answered the telephone at her home on Friday said that she had just come home and was doing fine but was too tired to talk.
Mr. Collins, a stocky man in a green t-shirt and tan pants, was arraigned before Judge Doris Gonzalez in Bronx Criminal Court. His lawyer, Victor Piacente, entered a plea of not guilty. Mr. Collins was released on $5,000 bail. Neither family members nor Mr. Piacente would discuss details of the case.
Mr. Browne said that the Collins house was the first place detectives went when they began their investigation on Sunday. He said Mr. Collins told them he had been inside all day and had not seen or heard anything. “It was a quick interview,” Mr. Browne said. The detectives went on to interview at least fifty other people in the neighborhood that day. They also searched two nearby parks. On Thursday, Mr. Browne said, Sergeant James Foley, the detective squad commander of the 50th Precinct, went back to Independence Avenue with Detective Brian Bartlett. They noticed something that had apparently been overlooked: a hole in the white plastic fence between the Collins yard and the nursing home.
That led the sergeant to conclude that the arrow had come from much closer than the police had initially believed. The sergeant and the detective went back to the Collins house. There was no answer, but they saw two men in the street. One was Mr. Collins, walking his three dachshunds. Mr. Browne said that Mr. Collins repeated what he had told the detectives on Sunday, that he had not seen or heard anything. But the detectives kept the conversation going. “They say, ‘Hey, did you happen to see that hole in the fence over there? Any idea what caused that?’ ” Mr. Browne said. Mr. Collins, he said, suddenly seemed “eager to end the interview.” After the detectives took his telephone number, he went in the house and the sergeant and the detective went toward the nursing home.
The sergeant called in two more detectives, Chris Burke and Paul Sullivan. They huddled at the nursing home before going back to the Collins house to ask Mr. Collins for a formal statement. Detectives Burke and Sullivan went to the door, with Sergeant Foley and Detective Bartlett about twenty feet away. Detective Burke made the request. “You could just see the breath leave his lungs,” Mr. Browne said. “You could see this large exhale of ‘Oh, no.’ ”
At the station house, Mr. Browne said, Mr. Collins told the detectives that he had spoken to his real estate agent, who had urged him to get a lawyer. Though no fingerprints were found on the arrow that struck Ms. Brown, a search warrant turned up five other arrows that belonged to Mr. Collins, Mr. Browne said.
At the nursing home on Friday, the mood brightened at the news of the arrest and arraignment. “Everyone is relieved,” said Jim Carroll, 62, as he pushed his mother Sarah, 96, in a wheelchair in the parking lot. “The uncertainty had really gotten to us all.”

Rico says the guy shoulda turned himself in earlier; this is going to go badly for him. But only in New York would a bow & arrow get you a 'weapons possession' charge...