Joe Marino/for New York Daily News Shelwyn Patt was arrested for the 2012 syringe attack against a New York City bus driver, but charges were dismissed. Now, the former defendant is a plaintiff who’s suing for $ 12 million over his arrest. The arrest of a Brooklyn man for stabbing a city bus driver with a syringe turned out to be a real bust.
Shelwyn Patt has filed a $ 12 million lawsuit against the city and the cops, alleging he was falsely arrested in October 2012 for the brutal attack on driver Mark Salandy as he operated a B68 bus.
Patt was collared two weeks later with some fanfare after a different driver, Jose Rivera, thought a passenger aboard his B67 bus looked like the wanted assailant depicted in a police sketch.
Cops boarded the bus, looked at the sketch and Patt and slapped on handcuffs. But the case against Patt apparently fell apart and the charges were dismissed and sealed in April 2013, according to the suit filed Tuesday in Brooklyn Federal Court.
“It was a pretty traumatic experience for him,” lawyer Cary Kaplan told The Daily News. “He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“There was no physical evidence and no confession,” Kaplan added.
Patt, 54, a retired Macy’s department store employee with no prior criminal record, was forced to spend thousands of dollars defending himself against the charges, Kaplan said.
The suit suggests the lineup that Patt was placed in was designed to implicate him because he was the only suspect in the group with a mustache.
Patt contends that as a result of a shoddy investigation, he has suffered emotional distress from being prosecuted and paraded before the media.
The city Law Department had no immediate comment.
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