Lessons To Be Learned

The family of Yonkers resident Zeena Vattakalam, 24, denies that she jumped in front of the D train last Sunday. They say she suffered from several medical problems and may well have just fainted. A witness said that she didn't appear to be distressed or sad or anything while waiting for the train. And still another said she looked perfectly normal-like she was on her way to work-before she took the leap.

The first question that came to our minds, though, was "The D train was actually running?" Well, in any case, she sure put a stop to that.

Crooks in general are not the brightest bulbs, but you'd think they'd at least be smart enough to take their cues from actual news instead of tv shows. Take for instance what happened in East New York last Saturday night. A woman called 911 to complain that a crazy ex-boyfriend was at her place in violation of an order of protection. When cops arrived, he scampered up to the roof of the three-story building, figuring he'd be able to hide by dangling from the edge of the roof by his fingertips. But he sure wasn't no Spiderman, and was taken to the hospital a short time later with broken arms and legs.

If a man who's been calling and threatening you calls again and invites you to step outside for a second, don't go. It seems a simple rule of thumb, but one Kian Yasu Beswick, 29, neglected to heed. An (ahem) "associate" of Beswick's had been making threatening calls to the Flatbush apartment the aspiring chef shared with his grandmother. It was assumed he was the one who called there again Monday night, because after only the briefest of conversations, Beswick ran outside, where he was promptly shot twice in the belly.

Cops on a routine patrol on Staten Island Monday afternoon thought it was kind of fishy to see some guy riffling through a mailbox that clearly wasn't his own. When they asked 29-year-old Grigol Rekhviashvili just what the heck he was doing, the scruffy man explained that he was only distributing supermarket circulars. Maybe the fact that he didn't have any circulars with him led cops to run a background check, which revealed that he was wanted for stealing credit cards out of the mailboxes of several other people. According to the Post, Rekhviashvili is in all sorts of trouble, being charged with everything from grand larceny to identity theft to, oh, lots of other things.

Here's another lesson to be learned-if you're going to explode in a fit of road rage, try to do it near a suburban home. That's what Howard Beach resident Anthony Salerno, 29, did on Tuesday. After he cut off another driver and both men stopped and got out of their cars, Salerno stomped over nearby house, grabbed a handy shovel, returned to the scene, and whomped the other driver with it. You have to wonder, don't you, what possessed the other driver to wait around?