Police today tracked down a missing, incoherent man – with what may be a million-dollar hole in his head – to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital today, only to discover he was released two days ago.
Anthony Franzese, who was badly injured when an air conditioner fell on his head outside his East Village apartment building in 2010, had filed a $21 million lawsuit against the landlord.
But he vanished a year ago, his lawyer Stuart Shaw said in telling Franzese’s story in today’s New York Post, which featured a photo of him.
That’s how NYPD Sgt. Kristine Gosling realized she had seen Franzese at the hospital on Tuesday, after police brought him in as an unidentified, incoherent patient.
Gosling, a former commanding officer of the NYPD’s Missing Persons Bureau who now works at Manhattan North Homicide, had done her old colleagues a favor by fingerprinting the “John Doe” and photographing him for the bureau, using a prototype NYPD hand-held computer.
After realizing who he was today, Gosling and Shaw went to St. Luke’s this afternoon to find Franzese. But their hopes crashed when they arrived and were told the “John Doe” had been released Wednesday.
Gosling and Shaw suspect Franzese, a decorated, 69-year-old Vietnam War vet who suffers from bi-polar disorder and serious brain injuries and who appears to have no family, is wandering the city now.
Shaw has spent the past year scouring hospitals and morgues in hopes of finding him, and was ecstatic today that The Post had led cops to a still-warm trail.
“That’s him! That’s him!” Shaw yelled in the hospital lobby, as Gosling showed him the photo of “John Doe” she’d taken Wednesday.
“I’m looking at The Post, and there’s no doubt in my mind that’s the man I fingerprinted,” Gosling told him.
“He’s extremely incoherent. He couldn’t even say his name to me. He couldn’t formulate words,” Gosling remembered, speaking to a hospital social worker.
But because authorities now have his fingerprints and have connected them to his identity, they hope Franzese will be found when he turns up at another hospital.
“Every bone in his body is sticking out,” Gosling told Shaw. “He’s 95 pounds soaking wet. He’s going to end up at a hospital again, I’m telling you, as another unidentified ‘aided’ or an unidentified DOA.”
“Hopefully, he’ll be brought in alive.”