The Army vet who fatally stabbed a man outside New York City’s main post office penned a rambling suicide note blaming his victim for starting the fight but insisting he “didn’t mean to kill him.”
“Just wanted to stop the threat,” Sir’mone McCaulla wrote on his MySpace page about Christopher Gutierrez, the stock boy he stabbed Sunday after the two bumped into each other and started arguing on Eighth Avenue.
McCaulla, of Harlem, wrote the lengthy, unpunctuated note filled with misspellings before ending his life in a girlfriend’s apartment in Philadelphia late Tuesday. He electrocuted himself by sitting in a bathtub and dropping an electrical appliance into the water.
He said he had just returned from New Jersey and was headed home to be with his daughter when he ran into the 20-year-old Gutierrez.
“I turned around cause we bumped into each other we started talking like watch where you goin and we could fight,” McCaulla wrote.
Police said surveillance video showed Gutierrez taking off his coat and getting into a fighting posture. McCaulla — who had a lengthy rap sheet — then lunged at his opponent four times with a knife, killing him.
“I know the people that are not in my shoes say I’m a fool for not walking off,” he wrote.
Gutierrez’s relatives, who were gathered at an East Village funeral home making arrangements yesterday, said there was “no excuse for what [McCaulla] did.”
“He could have just fought him like a man. Why would you take a knife and stab somebody in the chest three times? And he has a daughter, which makes it even more sad,” said Gutierrez’s sister, Kimberly Rodriguez.
Cops believe McCaulla had called the Philly girlfriend, Ykisme Ross, 31, the day after the stabbing and went to her apartment on Tuesday after his photograph appeared in newspapers. Late that afternoon, he typed the note and killed himself.
McCaulla, 28, had served in the Army in Kuwait. He wrote that he had trouble getting work since he returned in early 2008. He had passed the FDNY exam and was on the waiting list for a job, and wrote in his note that he wanted to be a correction officer.
“If its hard for me to find work out of the army its gonna be 10 times harder if I come out as a felon,” he said.
He signed off by writing, “I lived my life now it time for me to go.”
At his family’s home in Harlem, his stepfather said: “There is a soldier in the ground now.”
Additional reporting by Perry Chiaramonte in Philadelphia