QUESTIONS:
Cops guard the building of killer Jeffrey Johnson. Bystander Patria de los Santos, who was hit by police fire, questioned the cops’ shooting into a crowd. (AP)
REMEMBERING HIM: Empire State Building murder victim Steven Ercolino with his girlfriend, Ivette Rivera, who was in mourning yesterday. (
)
The devastated girlfriend of a beloved fashion executive killed by a former co-worker outside the Empire State Building paid touching tribute to her “soul mate’’ yesterday.
Ivette Rivera, 38, the longtime gal pal of slain Steven Ercolino, posted on her Facebook page a tender Christmastime photo of him kissing her.
“She’s bed-bound. She doesn’t want to get up. She doesn’t want to eat,” Ivette’s older brother, Walter Rivera, said of his sister.
Ercolino, 41, was gunned down Friday by ex-colleague Jeffrey Johnson, 58, who had held a two-year grudge against his old boss, blaming him for being let go after six years of working at Midtown’s Hazan Import.
“They were supposed to get married very soon,” Walter said. “It’s just devastating right now for her and all of us.”
Walter said their parents and another sister, who flew up from Florida, as well as Rivera’s childhood girlfriends were tending to the grieving woman at the Union City home she’d shared with Ercolino.
“She’s destroyed,” Walter said.
“It was like everything was great, it was beautiful. She had found something that had changed her whole life for the better, and now it was taken away.”
Ivette will try to attend wakes this evening and tomorrow at Ballard-Durand funeral home in White Plains. Ercolino’s funeral is scheduled for Wednesday at Our Lady of Sorrows Church, also in White Plains. He’ll be cremated later that day.
Johnson — whose body remained unclaimed yesterday at the city morgue — snapped after being told he had to leave his Upper East Side apartment because the owner was making renovations, law-enforcement sources said.
Meanwhile, one of the nine people wounded by police in the shooting said the two cops who killed Johnson had been too quick to fire.
“I feel like it was too many gunshots in the area,” Patria de los Santos told The Post yesterday from her Harlem home.
“It was full of tourists and people going to work,” said de los Santos, who was hit by a bullet fragment in the right thigh as she was headed to her job at a wig-making shop on Madison Avenue.
She said she didn’t see Officers Craig Matthews and Robert Sinishtaj firing at Johnson but started running as soon as she heard shots.
The two cops, assigned to the NYPD’s Critical Response Vehicle on routine terror patrol, said they “had no choice” but to fire the 16 shots, another source said.
Matthews and Sinishtaj told cops that a construction worker who had witnessed the shooting told them Johnson “had just shot and killed someone,” according to a law-enforcement source.
“When we confronted him, he pointed his gun at us,’’ the source quoted one of them saying. “We had no choice. We had to shoot him.”
The chaotic scene occurred during the morning rush, and the street was bustling with New Yorkers and tourists.
“It was like being in a movie. People were terrified,” de los Santos said. “People were crying and shouting, but mostly just running.”
She ducked for cover inside a Duane Reade drugstore and then realized she had been struck.
She was released from New York Hospital later that night after having a bullet fragment removed.
Additional reporting by Julia Marsh and Doug Auer