Following a three-day manhunt, an unemployed Army veteran was arrested today for allegedly killing four people at a Long Island pharmacy, and later identified as the shooter by a witness in a police lineup, authorities said.
David Laffer, 33, was arrested by Suffolk County police at about 10 a.m. at his Medford home.
Shortly after Laffer’s arrest, his wife Melinda Brady, 29, was also taken into custody, cuffed and placed in another car.
Sources said Laffer’s wife is believed to have driven the getaway car following the massacre.
The fiance of one of the shooting victims, James Manzella, was waiting for Jamie Taccetta in his car outside in the parking lot.
Manzella, the only person to see the shooter leave the store, identified Laffer as the gunman during a police lineup in Patchogue.
“It was definitely him,” a police official quoted Manzella as telling them.
Laffer was charged today with first-degree murder while Brady was charged with robbery and obstructing governmental administration for their alleged roles in the massacre.
Joanne Martino, who knows Laffer’s wife, said Brady was always taking painkillers for a stomach ailment but got hooked over the last couple of years.
Martino said she stopped talking to Melinda in 2009 when she realized she was a drug addict.
“She wasn’t sweet and innocent anymore. She’d talk really weird and fast about how she has to be taking all these pills,” she said.
Martino also said Brady appeared desperate just hours before the slaying.
“This past Saturday she was calling my friends, looking for a place to get pills because she didn’t have coverage anymore,” Martino said. “She was saying frantically, ‘I need my pills! I need my pills!’ She was acting like a complete drug addict.”
According to neighbors, Brady has been hospitalized in recent weeks and was always “out of it.”
Laffer had also been an inpatient at Brookhaven Hospital, where he was being treated for pain management — the first step towards entering a detox program, according to law enforcement sources.
Laffer’s two-story home, located in the same town where the bloodbath took place, had been under police surveillance since Tuesday night, sources said.
Cops said Laffer, who was clean shaven when taken into custody, allegedly donned a fake beard to disguise himself.
With police choppers buzzing overhead, a swam of officers raided Laffer’s home. Three cops led out Laffer, who was wearing a white T-shirt and black shorts. He was placed into an unmarked police vehicle. Brady was placed in a separate vehicle.
Both were taken to Suffolk County police headquarters in Yaphank, where cops questioned them for hours about the savage shooting.
Sources told The Post that Laffer, who has no previous arrest record, left a fingerprint at the pharmacy and that as a licensed gunholder, he allegedly used his own .45 to commit the murders.
Over a dozen tips came in identifying Laffer as the man who had committed the heinous shootings, sources said.
Peter Spano, who was doing some contracting work next door when cops pulled up, said, “It was totally quiet. It was unbelievable the way [police] did it. Four cars pulled up. They had him in cuffs within a couple minutes.”
Spano said the suspect looked emaciated and resembled the man in the store surveillance video.
“It looked just like him except without the beard. He looked like somebody who was beat down. He had his head down,” he said.
Laffer, an avid hockey fans and player, and his wife married in 2009 after Laffer proposed to her during a Islanders hockey game at the Nassau Coliseum three years earlier, according to a newspaper wedding announcement.
Longtime neighbor Zaida Ayala said she saw Laffer on Tuesday night calmly cleaning up his lawn as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
Ayala said she spoke to Laffer’s mother, Pam Laffer, that same day. She quoted the woman as saying, “Can you believe something like this happened in Medford? We can’t go out at night.”
Sources told The Post that Laffer has a military background and had been a member of the Army after graduating high school. On his Facebook page, Laffer boasted about being a Army intelligence officer.
Laffer’s experience with guns, police sources said, would explain how he could allegedly unleash the massacre at Haven Drugs Pharmacy before walking out with a bag loaded with prescription painkillers.
Friends said Laffer had worked at a Long Island firm, Cosa Xentaur, for eight years but was recently let go and had lost his health insurance coverage as a result.
Laffer’s arrest comes three days after a man walked into the pharmacy and killed four people.
On Monday, cops released stunning footage showing the baseball-capped fiend first strolling into the tiny mom-and-pop shop at about 10:20 a.m. Sunday, only minutes after druggist Raymond Ferguson, 45, had opened up the Southaven Avenue store along with a cashier, 17-year-old Bellport HS senior Jennifer Mejia.
Mejia wasn’t supposed to be working that day — her sister, also an employee, had already taken the day off. But Mejia volunteered to cover Father’s Day for an older male co-worker who has kids.
She and Ferguson were standing behind the drug counter when the nervous, scrawny robber — an addict hunting his drug of choice, oxycodone — opened a door to the enclosed area where they were and entered.
Without hesitation, the deranged druggie then executed the workers in cold blood. Then, within minutes, two unsuspecting store patrons entered the shop.
Byron Sheffield, a 71-year-old grandpa, had come in to get his usual prescription. Taccetta, a 33-year-old physical therapist and mother of two, was making a quick pit stop at the shop to pick up thyroid medication.
Manzella, who was sitting in his parked car outside the drug store at the time of the shooting, was set to marry Taccetta on Oct. 15.
Following this morning’s arrests, Taccetta’s brother, Daniel, ran up to the home where the suspect lives and tried to get cops to give him details about the bust.
“Did they get him? Did they get him? I want to see the son-of-a bitch,” he said. “Where is he?”
Cops parked in front of the home told him that a man had been arrested.
Daniel Taccetta later said that authorities informed him that Laffer and his wife are both addicted to drugs.
“This guy is a junkie,” he said. “The police told us he stole it for his wife who is a heroin addict.”
Suffolk County legislator Jack Eddington, who represents the area and was briefed by police, said Laffer’s wife is also involved.
“I believe it’s for harboring a fugitive,” he said.
Eddington, who has been a longtime customer of the pharmacy, said police told him it appeared Laffer shaved and cut his hair, apparently to avoid being identified through the store video of the robbery.
“They’re very confident with their arrest. They think they’ve got their person,” he said of police. “They were on top of this guy yesterday and were surveilling him al day and night.”
Cops had said that the gunman — a weasly figure sporting a backpack, beard and sunglasses — calmly walked to the front of the shop, where Taccetta was standing at a counter and Sheffield was in a nearby aisle.
He then pumped a single bullet into the back of the head of Taccetta without saying anything, her family said.
And still without uttering a word, he shot Sheffield, too.
Cops said the gunman then began stuffing oxycodone pills into his black backpack and fled back out the front door — making sure he shoved his white baseball cap down over his face as he left.
The bloodbath was the worst mass shooting on Long Island since 1993 when Colin Ferguson killed six people and wounded 19 others on a Long Island Rail Road train.
Meanwhile, mourners paid their respects at a wake this afternoon for Mejia, who was placed in a white casket with gold trim.
Beside the casket was Mejia’s graduation portrait and diploma, which she would have received later this month.
Additional reporting by Kieran Crowley, Joe Mollica, Ikimulisa Livingston and Reuven Fenton. The Associated Press contributed to this report.