Nothing fazes New Yorkers.
A former Toledo, Ohio city council member chucked a paint can full of cow’s blood onto the windows of the US mission to the UN this week in a gory stunt denouncing Israel, but passersby didn’t seem to notice or care.
“It was not an easy job and there was blood all over the place, but as usual in New York people just walked by and said, ‘Oh, that’s interesting.’ Nobody asked anything,” said Mike Ferner, 74, who spent Monday morning using a screwdriver to break up a gallon of frozen cow’s blood on an East Village sidewalk.
“Here, United States, have some blood. You like shedding it all over the world so much? There ya go. How about some blood,” Ferner shouted after chucking a paint can of blood onto the windows of the Israel mission.
Ferner was promptly arrested after the 12:30 p.m. blood-hurling and charged with criminal tampering, unlawfully possessing or selling of a noxious material and disorderly conduct, according to a criminal complaint.
He and spent a night in jail, in conditions he compared to Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib.
Ferner was released on his own recognizance following his Manhattan Criminal Court appearance the next day.
The Toledo politician is a renowned rabble-rouser who has been arrested multiple times as a member of Veterans for Peace, an organization whose mission is to “end all wars,” according to their website.
Ferner’s bloody protest served as the grand finale of the organization’s “40 Day Fast for Gaza,” during which he was hospitalized for low potassium levels.
“It’s so important for [Palestinians] to know not everybody in our government is a murderous psychopath,” Ferner said.
On Monday morning, Ferner stopped into a butcher shop in the East Village to pick up a gallon of cow’s blood in a large plastic Coke bottle.
“It was completely frozen like a rock, and I thought ‘God, what am I going to do with this?’,” Ferner said. “I asked them if they had a microwave, and they said no. Next door was a laundromat, and I asked if I could put in the dryer, and they said no.”
To melt down the Coke bottle of frozen blood, Ferner stepped out onto the sidewalk and began shaving it off into a paint can with a pocketknife.
“I had blood all over the place,” Ferner said. “I was thinking if anybody asks me, I could tell them this is concentrated cherry juice that I’m trying to defrost, but nobody asked!”
Ferner borrowed two screwdrivers from a nearby construction crew, which he used to chip at the block of frozen blood.
“I just kept hacking away at it with a screwdriver, and it was a warm morning, and as I was doing that it slowly melted,” he said.
Slowly, it started to melt, so Ferner hopped into a cab and sped to the US mission. There, he chucked his paint can of melted blood onto the windows and was promptly arrested.
“There was a core of it that I didn’t have time to chop up, and it didn’t melt, so when I threw it on the window there was this small football [of frozen blood], and it was laying on the sidewalk. The cops said, ‘What’s that?’ And I said, ‘Well, that’s just a part I couldn’t defrost’.”
Ferner is pleased with the response to his stunt and said people around the world are responding to the video. He hopes the Israel and US missions will “regain a piece of humanity” after his protest.
Ferner worked in an Illinois Navy hospital during the Vietnam War, and remembers planes full of injured soldiers arriving back home.
“I started seeing what happens to people when you go to war, it’s not like the movies. It’s not like John Wayne,” Ferner said.
Ferner has become a fan of the Big Apple and plans to spend his last few days in town riding the Staten Island Ferry and people watching in the East Village.
