The New Jersey pet store owner whose $7,000 parrot was swiped last month was randomly shot in the face with a crossbow Monday evening — and the violent repeat customer is now in custody on attempted murder charges.
The unfortunate entrepreneur, Katarina Rukavishnikova, was attacked just before 6 p.m. at her store, Birds by Joe 2 on Route 46 in Saddle Brook, according to NBC New York.
When cops responded to a 911 call about a seriously injured woman, they found Rukavishnikova had taken a crossbow arrow to the face, the outlet said.
The suspect, 53-year-old Raymond Carey, ran off afterward.
But cops — with help from the FBI and the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office — collared him at about 1 p.m. on Tuesday in Pine Beach, a tiny Jersey Shore town near Toms River.
Authorities charged him with first-degree attempted murder, among other things, and he is awaiting his first court appearance, the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office said in a press release.
Meanwhile, Rukavishnikova — who was brought to the hospital after the assault — had already returned to work by Tuesday.
Although she didn’t want to discuss the attack in detail, she told NJ.com it had nothing to do with the robbery — in fact, she said the shooter was a store regular.
“He’s a repeat customer. He shot me without any warning,” she said. “He didn’t say anything. When I got close to him, I saw the crossbow. And he shot me in the face with an arrow.”
No one answered the phone at Birds by Joe 2 when The Post called Tuesday afternoon.
Rukavishnikova has certainly had a run of bad luck lately — and it seems like the Jan. 23 robbery kicked it off.
That day, a wildly brazen thief snatched a coveted African Grey parrot worth about $7,000 in a caught-on-camera daylight sortie that stunned Rukavishnikova and left her terrified for the afflicted avian’s life.
The unidentified suspect wore a dark Nike hoodie when he walked into her store along the highway that afternoon and asked to see the pricey parrot.
“This guy came in and started asking all the right questions,” Rukavishnikova told The Post last month. “I thought, ‘OK, he’s going to buy the bird.’”
But that’s when the man suddenly seized the cage — with the bird inside — and flew the coop.
“It actually took me a few seconds to realize what was happening — the reality of it,” she said. “This never happened to us.”
The store’s security cameras caught the whole thing, and Birds by Joe later posted screengrabs to the store’s Instagram account.
“We definitely hope the bird is OK and alive,” she said. “Yes, it’s a lot of money that we’re losing. But at the same time, I’m more concerned about the well-being of the bird.”
African Greys, which are known for their intelligence and uncanny mimicry skills, are coveted exotic pets that could fetch a pretty penny on the black market.
A 24-year-old man named Onyx Calderon, of Paterson, was identified as a suspect in the bird-napping, according to New Jersey 101.5.
Cops eventually recovered the bird earlier this month in Paterson after they got a tip about its whereabouts, according to The Independent.
But Calderon appears to still be in the wind.
