Police fatally shot a man who hit and killed a father while driving along Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg on Monday, following a string of violent attacks the suspect committed in the city and beyond, according to authorities.
Suspect Michael Ward’s alleged crime spree began on Saturday when cops said he took off from New Jersey in a borrowed Acura with Delaware plates — which he failed to return — before swiping $20 from a senior in the Bronx, and fleeing.
Ward then slammed the ill-gotten Acura into the dad near Varick Avenue around 3:47 am while driving along Metropolitan Avenue toward Newtown Creek, and sped away from the scene.
Paramedics found the victim — the father of a young son who authorities said lives in Bushwick — with head and body trauma lying unconscious and unresponsive in the street, and rushed him to Woodhull Hospital, where doctors pronounced him dead.
Less than an hour later, Ward ditched the Acura with damage to its front in Manhattan before hijacking and driving off with a newspaper-delivery woman’s Honda Odyssey van around 4:30 am, according to officials, who said investigators then pieced together that the abandoned Acura was likely the same car that struck and killed the dad.
And about ten minutes after he absconded in the van, the suspect forced another man out of his 2018 Acura sedan elsewhere on the distant isle after repeatedly punching him in the face, driving off in that vehicle and leaving the stolen Honda behind, authorities said.
Ward then made his way to Long Island, where — while stopped at a stop sign inside an illicit Volkswagen that cops said he ditched the second Acura for — two drivers honked at him around 10:30 am. The suspect emerged from his ride with a bat and started smashing one of the motorists’ car’s windows, before bludgeoning the driver who exited the vehicle in the head, according to a Police Department spokesman.
A nearby Nassau County patrolman spotted the unfolding assault, and when the officer tried to approach Ward, he lunged at the cop, who then fired at the suspect in the chest, killing him, authorities said.
Ward’s fatal Williamsburg collision is the third in Brooklyn this month. On March 2, two separate drivers hit 73-year-old John Ramondino, killing him as he attempted to diagonally cross 65th Street at the intersection of W. Sixth Street outside of a crosswalk in Bensonhurst. Three days later, Staten Island-resident Dorothy Bruns sped through a red light at the intersection of Ninth Street and Fifth Avenue in Park Slope, killing two young children, and sending their two mothers — one pregnant — and a man to the hospital with injuries.
