MANHATTAN CRIMINAL COURT — He was thinking of the children.
The man who accidentally shot himself in the leg while buying coffee and a bagel inside Zabar’s Tuesday morning was protecting kids by ditching the weapon in Riverside Park, his defense attorney claimed Wednesday.
“He didn’t want a child to find the gun and hurt themselves,” Louis Leston Anderson’s defense attorney, Andrew Friedman, said.
“The gun had been put somewhere where no child, no person could inadvertently fire it and injure themselves,” he said.
Anderson, 49, walked with a slight limp and appeared in green hospital scrubs during his arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court Wednesday afternoon. He was ordered held on $7,000 bail on weapons and reckless endangerment charges.
Prosecutors blasted the notion that Anderson was thinking of anyone but himself — saying that he placed the .9mm gun in a clear Ziploc bag next to a rock by the arch in the park after he’d been shot.
“He discarded [the gun] in the park, in Riverside Park, a place where there are children all the time,” Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sigall said.
Anderson, who has nine prior arrests, said he initially found the gun by the Lincoln Tunnel while sorting through some trash, law-enforcement sources said.
After the shooting, bloodhounds tracked him to West 80th Street and Riverside Drive, but he'd fled to Mount Sinai Roosevelt Hospital by that point, sources said.
Sigall said the shooting was captured on Zabar's cameras.
Anderson is next due in court on Friday.
