A vacationing Bronx cop who tackled and arrested a boozed-up, raging passenger on a flight from the Caribbean said yesterday that he sprang to action when he saw “the fear in passengers’ eyes.”
Officer Anibal Mercado, an 18-year NYPD veteran, was returning on JetBlue from a Thanksgiving getaway to the Dominican Republic when a man four rows back allegedly launched into a violent, verbal attack on two female flight attendants.
The man, identified as Antonio Ynoa, 22, allegedly went wild after the attendants told him to stop drinking and refused to bring him soda to mix with the duty-free rum he’d brought on board in a carry-on. Ynoa, who was traveling alone and was in a window seat next to two young moms holding babies, went ballistic, cursing and shouting at the top of his lungs, Mercado said yesterday.
He punched a male flight attendant four times in the face, said the cop.
“The babies were crying, I could see the fear in the passengers’ faces,” said Mercado, who works out of the 44th Precinct in the Highbridge section of The Bronx.
“If I didn’t step in, I didn’t even want to imagine what could have happened.”
Mercado, who was unarmed, jumped up and confronted the shorter Ynoa, identifying himself as a police officer.
He easily wrestled Ynoa to the ground before asking the flight attendants for handcuffs.
“He struck me a few times in the face,” said Mercado.
The foul-mouthed flier was still howling when Port Authority police met the flight and charged him with assault and interfering with a flight crew.
The arrest, Mercado said, “was normal routine — except that I was up 30,000 feet.”