Son of Sam Is Arrested in Yonkers

On the night of August 10, 1977, NYPD detectives John Falotico and William Gardella walked up on a parked Ford Galaxie outside 35 Pine Street in Yonkers with their guns drawn on the driver. Inside sat David Berkowitz, a 24-year-old postal worker who had spent the previous year and a half shooting young people, mostly couples sitting in parked cars, across the Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. Investigators got to him through an ordinary parking ticket, issued near his final attack in Bensonhurst on July 31, that traced back to his car and then his address. Falotico pressed his gun near Berkowitz's temple, and Berkowitz calmly admitted he was Sam, the name signed to the taunting letters that had rattled the city all summer. The arrest closed a manhunt that had put extra patrols on every dark street in the outer boroughs and made an entire generation of New Yorkers think twice before parking to be alone together.