UPDATE: Correction Officer Charged With Assaulting Elderly Man At Pizza Shop
Last month, the NYPD requested the public’s assistance in finding the woman seen in the above photos in connection with an assault of an 87-year-old man in Fort Greene.
On May 18, inside Pipitone’s Pizza & Pasta located at 100 DeKalb Avenue, police say the woman pushed Andrea Chiarappi, causing him to fall over by the shop’s entrance.
Police arrested Kyesha Crafton, a 33-year-old correction officer on Monday, June 5, and charged her with assaulting Chiarappi, the New York Daily News reports.
Chiarappi suffered two cuts to his right shoulder and both knees as well as bruising to his right arm. The victim reported the incident to police after walking to Brooklyn Hospital for treatment.
A Florida resident who was in town for his granddaughter’s wedding, Chiarappi told police that he entered the pizza shop with a lit cigarette. Crafton, who was in the shop with a young boy, confronted Chiarappi about his smoking, according to police.
Chiarappi says he went outside to extinguish the cigarette and upon re-entering the shop, claims he approached Crafton to apologize. In response, Crafton pushed the man out of her way and exited the eatery, police say.
“Instead of accepting my apology, she was yelling me,” Chiarappi told the Daily News. “She pushed me from the back and she slammed my shoulder into the edge of the door.”
Crafton has worked as a correction officer at the Fishkill Correctional Facility since 2012, according to the Daily News. She has been suspended without pay.
She was arraigned on Monday and released on her own recognizance.
