By Corey Kilgannon, The New York Times
A man charged with abducting his wife from a Queens hospital emergency room on Saturday and shooting her co-worker tried to escape from the police yesterday by lunging out a patrol car window in North Carolina while he was being extradited to New York, the authorities said.
At 3:15 p.m., as Fayetteville police officers were escorting the man, Miguel Carrasquillo, 33, to Raleigh-Durham International Airport, Mr. Carrasquillo broke a window while the patrol car was traveling on Interstate 40 in Johnston County, said Sgt. J. D. Devane, of the Fayetteville police.
The police quickly captured Mr. Carrasquillo, who was taken to Wake Medical Center in Raleigh and was to be returned to New York, Sgt. Devane said. “He never escaped police custody,” the sergeant said.
The attempted escape came three days after the police say Mr. Carrasquillo burst into the emergency room of Elmhurst Hospital Center in Queens about 8 a.m. Saturday and grabbed his wife, Nancy Carrasquillo, 42, an admitting clerk at the hospital who had filed an order of protection against her husband the day before.
Mr. Carrasquillo shot a hospital employee who tried to intervene and then forced his wife out of the hospital at gunpoint, the police said. They said he hijacked a taxi to a nearby subway station and disappeared into the subway, setting off a manhunt in the city that ended on Monday when the couple were found on a southbound bus in North Carolina.
Ms. Carrasquillo arrived at La Guardia Airport from Raleigh last night at 7 p.m. looking relaxed, healthy and holding a large blue teddy bear. She was whisked through the airport terminal, escorted by two plainclothes police detectives and two airport security guards, who prevented a reporter from speaking to her. But, in a brief exchange, a reporter did inform Ms. Carrasquillo about the police report that they had foiled an escape attempt by her husband. “I’m glad,” she responded, as she smiled broadly and squeezed her teddy bear, a gift from the detectives, and was driven off in a dark sedan.
Sgt. Devane of the Fayetteville police said that Mr. Carrasquillo would be brought back to New York, but that the time frame was still unclear. A spokesman for the Queens district attorney’s office said that Mr. Carrasquillo would be arraigned in Queens Criminal Court on first-degree charges of kidnapping and criminal contempt, as well as attempted murder and criminal possession of a weapon, both in the second degree. The kidnapping charge carries a maximum possible sentence of life in prison.
Mr. Carrasquillo’s arrest on Monday came after New York police detectives got a tip that he and his wife were on a Greyhound bus bound for Miami. They called the Fayetteville police, who met the bus in North Carolina. The Fayetteville police spotted the couple with no luggage and managed to arrest Mr. Carrasquillo after a struggle. He was carrying a .32-caliber pistol in a bag with Chinese food, the police said.
Ms. Carrasquillo had told friends that her husband had been abusive and had become enraged over her intention to divorce him, some of her friends said.
Yesterday, in a news conference at Elmhurst Hospital Center, the injured hospital employee, Marcos Motta, 55, described how Mr. Carrasquillo had burst into the emergency room on Saturday morning, grabbed Ms. Carrasquillo by the hair and twisted her arm behind her back.
Mr. Motta said he was shot in the jaw and neck after instinctively moving toward the couple to try to defuse the situation.
“I saw a friend in distress and I tried to go to her aid, to calm him down,” he said. “I never saw the gun until the very last second.”
“I turned and saw the barrel looking at me,” he said. “I passed a security guard and another fellow and I found myself in firing range.”
Mr. Motta said that he had met Mr. Carrasquillo before the shooting on Saturday and that Ms. Carrasquillo had confided in him that her relationship with her husband had turned stormy.
“There were some conversations to that effect,” he recalled.
Dr. Phillip Fairweather, the assistant director of the emergency department, said that Mr. Motta was “remarkably lucky” and that the shooting could have easily been fatal. The bullet just missed the jugular vein, he said. Mr. Motta was operated on immediately, but if more time had elapsed, the swelling from the bullet could have cut off circulation to his brain, Dr. Fairweather said.
Before being taken away in a wheelchair, Mr. Motta said, “It wasn’t her fault that I got injured.”
Michael Wilson and Janon Fisher contributed reporting for this article.