As if this week has not been horrible enough, a particularly dreadful crime in Bellerose, Queens, had the whole area of eastern Queens and central Nassau County in a panic the past 48 hours until the perpetrator was, mercifully, captured in Times Square late yesterday afternoon. Jamel McGriff, a 42-year-old out on parole with a long, violent rap sheet (including being required to register as a sex offender), went from door to door in leafy Bellerose in broad daylight at 10 a.m. knocking on doors until he found a target of opportunity — a couple in their late seventies whom he tormented and killed before setting their house on fire:

The suspect had earlier knocked on other doors in the neighborhood asking to charge his cell phone but was turned away before Frank Olton was seen on surveillance footage apparently allowing him in his backyard around 10:18 a.m., authorities said. The footage showed the owner apparently letting his killer in the rear door, according to cops. When the maniac left hours later, he was carrying a paper bag and one dark color bag, cops said…Once the fire was under control, police and firefighters made a grisly discovery. Frank Olton was found bound with a bungee cord in the basement and stabbed multiple times, while his wife’s body had been set on fire.

As Joe Marino, Georgett Roberts, and Jorge Fitz-Gibbon of the New York Post reported, McGriff “was still on parole after being released from a 17-year state prison sentence in 2023, had been arrested for a sex attack of a worker at knifepoint inside a store in 2005 and other violent crimes. He had a criminal history dating back 30 years, including multiple robberies. The fiend had failed to register as a sex offender in November 2024 and he was wanted by the NYPD as a suspect in two recent robberies. Yet, he was not slapped with a parole violation, according to officials.” On Wednesday, the NYPD issued an alarmed warning: NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said that McGriff was “armed and dangerous” and “The suspect’s MO is to go door to door, asking for some kind of assistance until he can gain entry.” The local police departments around Nassau were on heavy alert. The closest one could find to a motive for this brutality was robbery: McGriff was apprehended after “he used his victim’s charge cards at Macy’s and then to see a movie at the Regal Cinema in Times Square on Wednesday afternoon after he had pawned off two cell phones in the Bronx a day earlier.”

We have a serious under-incarceration problem when it comes to this sort of nihilistic predator. At least with his capture, multiple neighborhoods could go back to answering their doors and working in their yards.