The former Broadway hoof accused of pushing a retired teacher down the stairs of a Manhattan subway posted an ominous message online last year before going off the rails with a series of deconstructed busts.
“Sorry, I had a manic episode,” Ramil Burke, 32, wrote on Facebook in July. “Do you still want to have sex with me?”
About six months later, in February, the once-promising artist was subjected to the first of what would be four bizarre arrests before being charged with murder in a video recorded of 76-year-old former teacher Ross Falzone at the 18th Street station in Chelsea on Thursday.
The horrific footage shows the attacker walking up behind Falzon and pushing him so hard, sending the elderly victim flying into the air and onto the concrete steps below.
At the time, Burke was allegedly still wearing his wristband from the psych ward at Bellevue Hospital, where he had been taken by cops earlier in the day due to a phone call of an “emotionally disturbed person.”
He fled the scene, then appeared in court Friday morning for a hearing on an unrelated assault case. He was allowed to walk free after the hearing because no one had yet linked him to the subway attack.
NYPD investigators later discovered him at Penn Station and identified him from surveillance photos as Falzone’s alleged attacker. Burke was arrested and is now being held without bail on a charge of second-degree murder of Rapp.
It was an alarming fall from fame.
Burke posed with movie stars and was part of the cast of the hit Broadway show “King Kong” until 2019, before a friend said he lost him during the COVID pandemic.
In recent months, some of his online posts have indicated increasingly erratic behavior.
“Show your work: Torment vs. Torture,” he wrote on Facebook on April 30 — adding in what would be his final post, “From your soon-to-be father of philosophical existentialism (think Toth or Hermes).”
Burke has been arrested by the NYPD four times since February, including for the collapse at the Seventh Avenue and West 23rd Street station in Chelsea on February 14, when cops responded to a report of a man with a shovel who had allegedly smashed several doors and thrown a trash can onto the tracks.
Three Port Authority police officers were injured during the arrest.
Mayor Zahran Mamdani told reporters on Friday that he would call on the city’s hospital system to review its psychiatric evaluation process and discharge protocols to determine why Burke was released before the attack.
In a statement Monday, a City Council representative told The Post that officials are “now going through the review process” and added that the city hospital system and state health officials are also investigating.
Additional reporting by Matthew Fischetti