Kidnapping Scheme Leads To UWS Car Crash, Arrests: Police

UPPER WEST SIDE, NY — Two men are facing charges for a kidnapping scheme that originated in Brooklyn and ended with a dramatic arrest on an Upper West Side fire escape, police said.

Rondell Halley, 33, and Francisco Jimenez, 24, were arrested Monday and have been charged with kidnapping and drug and weapons charges, police said. The two men are accused of kidnapping a deliveryman at gunpoint after a car crash in Brooklyn and holding the man for ransom, police said.

The wild scheme began when a the 32-year-old delivery driver got into a fender bender with a parked car in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn. When the driver went to inspect the damage, Halley and Jimenez approached him and claimed to know the owner of the parked car, police said. The accused kidnappers told the driver to pay them in cash to forget about the collision, police said.

Halley and Jimenez kidnapped the driver at gunpoint when he refused to pay them, drove the man to another location in a white BMW and called his boss to set up a ransom payment, police said. The boss agreed to meet the men at a Chase Bank on West 73nd Street and Broadway for the payoff, but then called police to report the crime, the NYPD's 20th Precinct Commanding Officer Timothy J. Malin wrote in a Facebook post on the precinct's page.

"Officers from the 20th Precinct responded and met the supervisor at 73rd and Broadway, and he told them the thought his worker was being unlawfully imprisoned by armed perpetrators who were trying to extort money from him. So the officers moved out of sight and laid in wait," the precinct commander wrote.

When Halley and Jiminez arrived at West 72nd Street and Broadway with the delivery man in their capture, the trap was sprung. Officers moved in to make an arrest, which led Halley and Jiminez to attempt an escape, Malin said. The duo crashed their white BMW into a building on West 71st Street before splitting up and fleeing on foot, the precinct commander said.

Halley was arrested on the street, but Jiminez took officers on wild chase that led through a school, and alleyway and eight stories up a fire escape until he was arrested, police said. Neither the delivery man nor the suspects nor any police officers were hurt during the chase, Malin wrote.

"Bad guys in jail? Yep. Anybody hurt? Nope. A gun off the streets? Yep. We'll go ahead and label that 'some damn fine police work,'" Malin wrote in the Facebook post.

Police searched the white BMW used by Halley and Jiminez and found a pistol, heroin and cocaine, Malin wrote.

Photos courtesy NYPD