A 42-year-old ex-con wanted for a five-month-old fatal shooting at a Bronx barbecue honoring neighborhood friends who had recently died was grabbed by police trying to flee the country into Canada, police and the victim’s fiancée said Friday.
James Hardy was arrested on Thursday and hit with murder, manslaughter and other charges for shooting Thomas Washington near W. 175th St. and Macombs Road in Morris Heights, cops said.
Washington’s fiancée, Kisha Davis, was overjoyed to learn an arrest was made.
“[The detective] was like, ‘I got good news for you,'” she recalled. “He said, ‘We picked him up. We have him in custody.’ It felt like a big relief just came over me.
“I can’t stop doing this,” Davis said, pointing to a tear rolling down her face.
Washington, 44, was attending the Sept. 2 barbecue at the nearby Galileo Playground with Davis and Davis’ aunt when he was shot in the leg about 11 p.m., cops said.
“It’s crazy because it was so quiet,” she said. “We were sitting outside the park, up against the gate. He said, ‘Let’s go to the store,’ so I was like ‘OK, let’s go.’ I went to turn around and I hear like a pop like a firecracker. I turn and look and I’m like, ‘Who put off a firecracker, what the hell is going on?’ I turn around to him and he’s walking to me [holding his leg].”
“They shot me!” Washington screamed.
“I’m panicking, I’m bugging,” Davis recalled. “The wound is underneath his thigh, and now blood’s coming down the back of his leg. You smelled the gas, I thought it was firecracker powder, but it was gunpowder.”
Medics took the father of three to St. Barnabas Hospital, where he died, police said. The bullet had hit an artery and Washington bled to death.
A person of interest was apprehended at the scene, but initially let go, cops said. It was not immediately clear how police connected the shooting to Hardy and if he was the man initially taken into custody.
A motive wasn’t immediately disclosed although Hardy admitted to being at the scene, detectives told Davis.
The annual barbecue where Washington was killed was organized to celebrate a memorial mural showing the names of people who recently died in the neighborhood, both from street violence and natural causes, friends told the Daily News at the time.
“Now they’re gonna put him on the wall,” said one woman who passed by the scene, shaking her head as she walked by.
The mural shows a stone angel on a pedestal flanked by two large gravestones in a cemetery. “Welcome To Da Road,” an inscription above the angel reads.
Several witnesses described the gathering as calm and said they did not hear gunshots or see any fights. Another friend, a 58-year-old man who gave his nickname, Shadow, said people on the block treat each other like family.
“There was nobody that was gonna have animosity towards anyone because everyone that we knew there was part of a family,” he said.
Davis didn’t recognize Hardy’s name when detectives identified him as the killer. Months after the shooting, she still didn’t know what sparked the shooting.
“I want to know why,” she said when asked what she would say if she could speak to Hardy. “We were at a memorial for people that passed away and you do that? You don’t give a f–k, period. Us being grown, they could’ve fought, and got it off his chest, and he would’ve lived to see another day.”
Hardy has a criminal record with 11 arrests. In 2001, he was sentenced to six years in prison after being convicted of assault in Manhattan, according to state prison records. He was released early in 2005 but was put back in jail for violating his parole and was ultimately freed in 2010, records show.
His arraignment in Bronx Criminal Court for the Sept. 2 shooting was pending Friday.
Washington did a stint in prison as well, but had turned his life around and was working as a dishwasher at a kitchen for a Midtown law firm when he was shot. He and Davis began dating four years ago and got engaged a year before his death.
“He didn’t have an issue with nobody. That’s why it’s so crazy to me,” Davis said. “He went to work Monday to Friday. He would leave at 5:30 a.m. in the morning, he would get off around 4, 4:30 p.m.”
Her fiancé’s death has Davis “all the way broken,” she said.
“It takes everything in me to get up in the morning and do what I have to do,” she said. “This is something that’s really gonna bother me for the rest of my life.”
