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A pair of kidnappers who abducted a delivery driver at gunpoint and demanded money from his boss were arrested after a police chase that ended on an Upper West Side fire escape, authorities said.
The 32-year-old driver was making a delivery in Brooklyn around noon on Monday when he accidentally hit a parked car, Captain Timothy Malin, the commanding officer of the 20th Precinct on the Upper West Side, said at a news conference Tuesday.
After he hit the car, two men approached him and demanded cash, but the delivery driver told them he’d have to call his boss, Malin said.
When the driver’s boss told him they’d go through the insurance company, however, the two men pulled out a gun, forced the driver into a white BMW sedan and got on the phone with the boss.
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“If you want your van back, and if you want your delivery driver back, you’re going to have to pay us,” they told the boss, according to Malin.
The boss, however, “very smartly” told the men to meet him at West 73rd Street and Broadway in Manhattan, Malin said.
After the call, the driver’s boss called 911 and met up with officers from the 20th Precinct, who devised a plan to trap the kidnappers.
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When the kidnappers showed up at the intersection with the delivery driver around 3 p.m., the officers tried to stop them. The kidnappers tried to get away, but ended up crashing the car on the sidewalk, Malin said.
Officers were able to catch one of the kidnappers, but the other ran down the block and through a school in an attempt to flee.
He eventually ran up eight stories on a fire escape on West 72nd Street, where he was arrested, according to Malin.
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After officers got a warrant to search the kidnappers’ car, they found a handgun, a small amount of heroin and a small amount of cocaine inside, according to Malin.
“[This was] one of the strangest cases that I’ve been a part of in the 18 and a half years I’ve been with the New York City Police Department,” Malin said.
The delivery driver was “shaken up, but completely unhurt,” the commanding officer noted.