Cops took John Potts to Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric ward for evaluation, after he capped his weekend's worth of crazy behavior by threatening to bash his stepfather's face in with a shovel, then running off and jumping into the Raritan Bay while screaming that he had the bubonic plague. Thursday morning he attacked a peacock in a Tottenville Burger King's parking lot, battering the bird so badly, in front of a crowd of horrified onlookers, that it had to be euthanized. He was yelling then that he was killing a vampire.
The trip to Bellevue for an evaluation may have been superfluous. Potts' own mother confirmed that her son is schizophrenic and was hospitalized at the South Beach Psychiatric Center last fall. She claims that her son is actually an animal lover and perfectly amiable when he's on his medication, but he stopped taking them last month. Potts' mother hopes her son doesn't wind up in jail, but isn't that excited about him being free either. "[She] said her son 'doesn't deserve to go to prison. He needs to be hospitalized. I dread the idea of him getting out.'"
John Potts has been living in the woods on Staten Island, where he has been battling demons (literally, he believes), when not stopping in at his mom's place to do laundry and take showers. His mother figures he may have graduated to battling vampires, but is thankful that he only mistook a bird for one, instead of a child. Potts is clearly an ill man, but he also comes across as kind of an a-hole. All of today's articles include the following quote of Potts protesting to cops: "I don't see what the big f-----g deal is about this bird. It had negative energy. It came out of the darkness and I kicked it."
The peackock, which Potts severely injured by grabbing it by its neck, whirling it around and smashing it against the ground, in addition to hitting it with a baseball bat and kicking it, was named Chocolate by its 6-year-old owner, whose dad found the bird in a bar's parking lot a few weeks ago. It's thought that it could be one of the peackocks that a Staten Island man named George Burke raises. He gave a few to a friend in Tottenville a while back. Burke coincidentally has employed Potts on a few occasions to do odd jobs on his Staten Island estate.
(The Metropolitan Club, the peacock is the mascot???, by jwilly at flickr)
