A Bronx man who lives in the La Guardia flight path used a military-grade laser to blind commercial pilots as they took off and landed — just days after a near catastrophe at the airport, authorities said Tuesday.
Frank Egan, 36, shot the green beam toward at least four planes from a window in his mother’s Coddington Avenue home between 7 and 8 p.m. on Monday, cops said.
The NYPD scrambled a helicopter to track him down, but cops struggled to find his location until they devised an ingenious plan.
“We went to The Bronx and flew around 400 to 500 feet for approximately 20 minutes and couldn’t find anything,” said Detective Richard Mardarello.
“That’s when I thought, ‘Let’s pretend we’re an airliner.’ So we went out east and climbed up to 20,000 feet and then flew the approach. I turned the front lights on to mimic a commercial airliner.”
On the first run, he and his partner, Royston Charles, didn’t see any light source — but Egan took the bait on the second pass.
The cops then swooped down to the building where Egan was hiding and pointed a spotlight into his mother’s apartment.
“I turned in to the right and flew toward the source down to 400 feet. [The crew]focused the light on the windows the laser was coming out of,” Mardarello said. “By mimicking the airliner, we fooled him into lasering us.”
But it was a painful plan.
“Unfortunately, it hit both of us right in the eye,” Mardarello said. “You feel a strong tingle in your eyes. You have a burnt spot where you can’t see. It is very dangerous for any pilot to be blinded.”
A team of cops knocked on the Coddington Avenue apartment in Schuylerville and were met by Egan’s mother, who invited them inside. They discovered the powerful laser sitting on top of the refrigerator, the cops said.
Egan — a florist in New Rochelle — immediately confessed to pointing it at the aircrafts and was taken to the 45th Precinct station house.
“This laser was no little dinky pointer. It was a commercial-grade, level-3 laser. It lit up the cockpit green, and that’s how we were able to follow it all the way down,” said Mardarello.
“What he was doing — it was possible it would have had horrible consequences. The casualties would be unthinkable.”
Egan targeted the first airliner crew just after 7 p.m. from a northwest-facing window with a clear view of planes making their final approach to La Guardia’s Runway 4-22, authorities said.
He lit up the cockpit of American Airlines Flight 1152 as it hit an altitude of about 4,000 feet, sources said.
He then allegedly fixed the light on Shuttle America Flight 5954, which was arriving from Chicago and flying at just 1,000 feet.
Both pilots reported seeing the light but suffered no injuries.
A minute later, he trained the beam on another Shuttle America flight, this one at 1,200 feet as it arrived from Houston. It illuminated the cockpit and disoriented the pilot and co-pilot, the sources said.
They both suffered eye injuries.
After taking about a 50-minute break, Egan allegedly pointed the laser at Toronto-bound Air Canada Flight 727 moments after it took off from La Guardia. That pilot was treated at a Toronto hospital.
Egan told cops that he purchased the black, tubular pointer from a Florida shop for $50, according to law-enforcement sources.
He shouted at reporters as he was led from a station house, “I didn’t point nothing! I was sleeping! I was sleeping!”
Late Tuesday night, he was ordered held in lieu of $50,000 bond or $5,000 cash bail, even though prosecutors had asked for $75,000. He could not raise the money and was held in jail.
He was charged with a felony count of reckless endangerment and felony assault in the second degree. He was also hit with a misdemeanor charge of “pointing a laster at an aircraft.”
His attorney said Egan “wasn’t the only one at home during the alleged incident. He was asleep at the time of the alleged incident.”
Additional reporting by Lorena Mongelli, Sophia Rosenbaum and Shawn Cohen
