A troubled carnival worker at Coney Island’s Astroland, who told friends he was about to skip town, was shot in the head execution-style and dumped in front of a Brooklyn yeshiva, police and family said today.
The body of Michael Rizzo, 30, was found by a passer-by lying face down in a pool of blood at the corner of East 10th Street and Avenue I outside the Young Israel of Flatbush school about 11:30 p.m. Friday night.
“I guess they weren’t man enough to do it face to face,” his girlfriend’s mother said. “He was trying to turn his life around. I guess that bothered some people.”
It was not clear whom Rizzo was trying to dodge.
Rizzo lived with his longtime girlfriend Michelle and their 9-year-old daughter just blocks from the Coney Island boardwalk where he worked as a “carny.” He had planned to leave town tomorrow.
Michelle’s mom refused to reveal where he planned to go into hiding.
The passer-by who discovered the body said Rizzo “looked like he been shot in the neck and back. There was blood all over the back of his shirt.”
Police sources confirm he was killed elsewhere and left at the school.
Michelle’s mom said that the day before he was killed, Rizzo had been interviewed by cable News Channel 12 about go-carts being removed from the beach at Coney Island.
Last August, he was arrested for allegedly assaulting his fiancée in a car.
A Manhattan cop spotted Rizzo grabbing the 25-year-old woman by the neck and yanking her hair at East 30th Street and Park Avenue South.
Cops also found an illegal gravity knife from the passenger-side dashboard, authorities said.