Ryan Brinkerhoff may be new to New York, but he still should have known that 7 World Trade Center is not the place to play with fire.
The 24-year-old commodities trader was arrested today for a bizarre 3 a.m. incident in which he wandered into the building drunk, got stuck in a freight elevator and then foolishly tried to get out by starting a signal fire, sources said.
The small flames set off emergency alarms in the shiny glass and steel building – which has risen from the ashes after 9/11 – and sent the elevator to the ground floor.
When he got out, the Kansas City, Mo., native was slapped with four counts of arson.
The seriousness of the allegations did not seem to faze Brinkerhoff today. He laughed and grinned while being escorted out of the 1st Precinct at about 1 p.m.
When asked why he did it, he answered, “Do what? I don’t know what you are taking about.”
Law-enforcement sources said that the booze-fueled shenanigans began at 3 a.m. when Brinkerhoff showed up at 7 World Trade Center, where he works on the 34th floor for a trading firm called DRW Commodities.
He pressed the wrong button inside the building’s elevator and wound up one floor above his office.
Confused, he got onto a freight elevator and again hit the wrong number, sources said. This took him to the 40th floor, where he could not get out because he didn’t have the password to open the door.
After about 30 minutes, Brinkerhoff allegedly tried to get attention by spraying aerosol cleaning fluid under the door and setting it alight.
The small fire set an alarm off and the elevator returned to the ground floor, where he exited.
He was captured on camera and quickly arrested.
“He was intoxicated. It kinds of explains what happened,” said one law-enforcement source.
His mother, Alicia Robertson of Gallatin, Mo., said her son had only recently moved to New York after DRW transferred him from Chicago.
“I can tell you the family is behind him 100 percent and that we love him,” she said.
On Brinkerhoff’s MySpace page, he appears in a video in which he blows fire from his mouth.
On Meetup.com, Brinkerhoff names whiskey and beer as two of his chief interests.