Accused David Ortiz gunman claims slugger wasn’t intended target
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The man accused of shooting David Ortiz in a botched $8,000 hit job claimed from jail Thursday that the baseball legend wasn’t his intended target — but he got confused by the retired slugger’s clothes.
“It wasn’t David, it wasn’t for David … Was confused,” Rolfi Ferreira Cruz shouted to journalists in Spanish through the bars of a police holding cell in the Dominican Republic, according to local outlet El Caribe.
The 25-year-old claimed he was thrown off by the colors of Ortiz’s duds, Listin Diario reported.
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VIDEO SHOWS SOPHISTICATED ATTACK ON EX-SLUGGER DAVID ORTIZ
The former Red Sox player, a 10-time All-Star and three-time World Series champ, is the most famous athlete from his native Dominican Republic. And at 6-foot-3 and 230 pounds, he definitely stands out.
Ferreira Cruz’s bizarre admission comes a day after local authorities alleged the former New Jersey resident had confessed to being the gunman who shot Ortiz Sunday in what they said was an orchestrated hit for a bounty of $7,832.
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Video released by authorities Thursday shows the shooter walking up to the Dial Bar and Lounge in Santo Domingo and open fire on the 43-year-old at nearly point-blank range.
Ortiz was wounded, but survived after a friend rushed him to the emergency room. Ortiz was later flown to Boston, where he was still recovering Thursday.
The video — pieced together from surveillance footage — also shows the moments leading up to the shooting, allegedly depicting motorcycle driver Eddy Vladimir Feliz García meeting with other suspects in the case near the bar.
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Witnesses said the gunman drove up on the back of Feliz García’s motorbike before the shooting — and tried to get back on, but fled when enraged bar-goers surrounded the vehicle, according to court papers.
Ferreira Cruz was already on the lam over two 2017 robberies in New Jersey, where he allegedly stuck up a 26-year-old man and a 41-year-old man on the same evening, the Passaic County Sheriff’s Office confirmed to The Post Thursday.
The owner of a bodega near the site of one of the robberies said she and her husband recognized his mug shot after the arrest in the Dominican Republic.
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“We were watching TV the other night and my husband say, ‘Hey, I know him!’ ” Magda Cruz, 41, said at her mini-mart on Highland Avenue in Clifton.
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“I recognize him. He lives around here. He was a customer. He came in regularly. Not for the last year … He went back to the Dominican Republic.”
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Another suspect in the shooting, Luis Alfredo Rivas Clase, was arrested in Passaic County in 2016 for allegedly driving around with an illegal machine gun and a high capacity magazine, authorities said. At the time, he was living in Queens, according to the sheriff’s office.
Rivas Clase — who Dominican authorities say is known as “The Surgeon” — also is wanted in connection with an April 2018 shooting in Reading, Pa. He remains at large in the Ortiz case.
Additional reporting by Craig McCarthy