The deranged Queens man accused of randomly stabbing an EMT to death on an Astoria sidewalk bizarrely claimed he was set up — insisting he was home watching “Star Wars” at the time of the savage, caught-on-video killing.
Peter Zisopoulos was in his mom’s Astoria apartment when FDNY Capt. Alison Russo-Elling was stabbed to death, he told The Post during in an exclusive jailhouse interview Friday from Rikers Island.
“That day I was inside watching TV. I never went outside,” claimed a stone-faced Zisopoulos, 35, who was recently found mentally fit for trial after stints at the upstate Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Center.
Showing no remorse and little emotion, a shaggy-headed Zisopoulos, wearing dark-rimmed glasses and a navy prison jumpsuit, insisted photos and surveillance video authorities say show him knocking Russo-Elling, 61, to the ground before mounting her and stabbing her 19 times had been “photoshopped.”
“A guy that looks like me, there’s a guy that looks like me stabbing her,” he said. “They have phony pictures. They photoshopped it. I guess they really hate me.”
When asked why anyone would falsely accuse him, Zisopoulos said, “People didn’t like me. The government. I don’t know.”
Russo-Elling, a mom and 9/11 World Trade Center responder, was on her lunch break and about half a block from her unit when she was suddenly accosted at 20th Avenue and 41st Street by man with a knife, authorities said. She was six months away from retiring.
A witness driving by intervened in the Sept. 29, 2022 attack, but Russo-Elling could not be saved. A Good Samaritan then chased the alleged assailant to his nearby family apartment, where he was arrested.
Zisopoulos faces up to life in prison on a second-degree murder charge. He’s pleaded not guilty.
“I got arrested in a police raid. My apartment was raided by SWAT,” Zisopoulos recalled. “I was sitting on my bed. It wasn’t a commercial break. I think I finished watching the movie. I was just thinking to myself, staring at the wall. Then I heard knocking and the police wanted to come in but I didn’t let them in. So they kicked in the metal door and I got arrested.”
Zisopoulos said he graduated Francis Lewis High School in 2005, then attended Stony Brook University on Long Island for electrical engineering before dropping out, in part due to the cost.
“I wasn’t hearing voices but people started yelling out my name. I had to leave,” he said.
He then served in the Army at Fort Benning where, he said, “I did one year, then I said, ‘I quit.’ It was too hard. They made me clean.”
“I thought it would be fun and games but it wasn’t. There’s real people in there,” he added.
He also claimed to have briefly worked as a tutor and a cashier at Duane Reade, and said he attended Queens College for a short time, “but it didn’t work out. The teachers told me to drop out. I don’t know. I didn’t make any noise.”
Police “planted” methamphetamine on him during a 2008 incident, Zisopoulos insisted, after which he was diagnosed as a schizophrenic at Elmhurst Hospital.
“In 2008 I was hearing voices, but I don’t think I was mentally ill,” he said, adding that he believes he was “under surveillance of some sort.”
In 2018, he was brought to a hospital by Russo-Elling’s unit after allegedly making anti-Asian threats online.
Zisopoulos said he’d been spending time before the murder “job searching,” but admitted, “Sometimes watching a movie I would fall asleep, then I would wake up the whole day was gone.”
He’s being medicated behind bars with the anti-depressant Lexapro and the anti-psychotic medication Zyprexa, he said.
Zisopoulos, who has previously been found mentally unfit to stand trial, had little to say about his time in the upstate psychiatric facility, but noted how patients were given “cookies and milk and sugary treats.”
But at Rikers, he continued, “I ordered a donut, it’s been two weeks and the donut hasn’t showed.”
He had nothing to offer the family and friends of Russo-Elling, claiming his mental illness made him an easy target.
“It’s easier for them to convict me than it is to convict the average person, because I have an illness, I don’t have adequate counsel and stuff like that. . . . It’s easier for them to do that than to open a new case.”
