He looks more like a high-school Poindexter than a psycho killer.
The jilted New Jersey man charged with repeatedly running over his girlfriend with his car on a busy street was icy calm during a brief hearing in Queens yesterday before he was hauled off to the Garden State.
The 5-foot-6, 160-pound Charles Ann refused to answer reporters’ questions about why he allegedly mowed down Aena Hong on Monday with his 2011 Hyundai Sonata.
“He seems sympathetic now. He does understand how serious the case is,” said Ann’s lawyer, Uchenna Emeagwali.
“My heart goes out to the families.”
Ann, in thick glasses and wearing the same gray shirt and black-and-white track slacks he wore at a hearing on Wednesday, was surrounded by court officers. He listened attentively but said nothing during the 20-minute hearing that finalized paperwork for his extradition to Bergen County.
New Jersey investigators say that Ann, 26, had been dating Hong, 25, for about a year but that the relationship went drastically wrong and Hong repeatedly tried to break up with him.
She obtained an order of protection against him, but he refused to acknowledge they were finished. Their tragic final act occurred at about 5 p.m. on a Fort Lee street.
Witnesses said Hong was walking while Ann followed her in his car about a block from the town’s police headquarters. They argued bitterly, and eventually Ann gave up trying to change her mind and drove off.
But he made a U-turn and raced back toward Hong, going the wrong way on a one-way street. After striking her, he put the car in reverse and backed over her, then drove over her again, Bergen County Prosecutor John Molinelli said.
On Tuesday, cops tracked Ann down at a friend’s apartment in Queens. Investigators said Ann, who is unemployed, had $3,000 in cash and his passport.
Authorities believe he planned to flee to his native South Korea. He has lived in the United States for more than 10 years and is a naturalized citizen.
Hong, whose family lives in South Korea, was in the United States on a student visa.
After his extradition papers were signed at yesterday’s hearing, Ann held his head high as he was escorted by two New Jersey detectives to a waiting police car.
He is expected to be ordered held on $3 million bail when he appears before a judge in Bergen County Superior Court on Monday.