A deranged West Virginia man cops say sparked pandemonium by placing a pair of rice cookers inside a lower Manhattan subway station sought treatment for his mental illness two days earlier — only to be turned away, his brother said Sunday.
“He called me saying he tried to get in a psych ward but they refused him. He was really upset,” Jason Griffin, 44, told the Daily News of his kid brother Larry Griffin II. “He said, ‘They don’t think I have problems.’ People expect you to be disheveled or talking to yourself, but some people have deeper problems.”
Instead, the younger hopeless Griffin, 26, returned to the streets, ultimately allegedly placing what looked like a pair of bombs at the Fulton St. subway station about 7:30 a.m. Friday. The NYPD’s Bomb Squad later determined the rice cookers were not a threat.
Jason Griffin didn’t know what hospital psych ward his brother tried to check into.
Cops nabbed Griffin, passed out from a drug overdose, at a home in the Woodstock section of the Bronx Saturday. He was arraigned early Sunday on charges of placing a false bomb and ordered held on $200,000 bail.
“He really needs help,” Jason Griffin said. “Prison would create a beast. He doesn’t belong there.”
He said his brother moved to the city by himself from the heart of coal-mining country in the spring, despite his warnings.
“You can’t control somebody else. I feel like I should’ve tied him to the couch,” the older brother said. “He’s highly ADD. He’s never been medicated . . . He was never treated.”
Jason Griffin added that his brother called him frantically following the Friday morning ordeal asking for his advice.
The older brother said he was in contact with an FBI agent as the agency hunted his brother and praised the feds’ handling of the case.
“I said, ‘Just please don’t shoot him. He’s unarmed. He just has mental illness,'” Jason Griffin said.
He said never in his wildest imagination did he think anything like this would happen.
“I thought he might (get in trouble) for dancing with the naked cowboy in Times Square,” he said. “He’s just totally oblivious. In his weird mind, maybe somebody wanted a rice cooker.”
