Cops have arrested a Brooklyn man in the vicious sex assault on a 85-year-old woman on an Upper East Side street, police said Thursday.
Jeffrey Ritter, 32, of East New York has been charged with criminal sexual act, robbery and sexual abuse, cops said.
"I didn't do it! I didn't do it!" the heavily tattooed Ritter yelled, after cursing at reporters outside the NYPD Special Victim's Unit headquarters in East Harlem.
Ritter, who is unemployed, lives with his transgender girlfriend and does odd jobs around the building - cleaning up and taking out the trash, neighbors said.
He has 11 prior arrests, including one in Nebraska for sexually abusing a child, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said. Ritter failed to register as a sex offender when he moved to New York.
Cops arrested Ritter late Wednesday after receiving a tip from a neighbor who recognized him from surveillance footage shown on TV.
Investigators initially picked Ritter up for failing to register as a sex offender, but he confessed under interrogation to the assault on the elderly woman, Kelly said.
Ritter sports a tattoo of the New York Yankees logo beneath his left eye, the name "Tahtianna" above his left eyebrow. On one side of his neck are the words "Slow Poke," and on the other the initials "SHLK."
The shocking attack occurred early Monday in one of the city's wealthiest zip codes - just a few blocks from Mayor Bloomberg's private home.
The 100-pound victim was taking a stroll at 5:40 a.m. when she encountered the sicko, who was lurking around Madison Ave. and E. 83rd St., pretending to talk on a cell phone.
Surveillance footage showed the beefy beast wrap his bulging, tattooed arms around the elderly woman's head, dragging her into a sunken stoop of a luxury residence.
The twisted perv then forced her to perform oral sex and stole her ring before fleeing. The woman was treated at a local hospital.
Ritter's neighbor, Olga Gonzalez, 60, said she saw the footage on the news and thought it might be him.
"I saw it. I said, 'That looks like that guy,' but I didn't know," she said. "Then I saw him the same day. I thought it wasn't him."
Investigators later said they believed the same man may have been responsible for an attempted rape in the neighborhood on May 22.
Kelly said investigators still have no direct information tying Ritter to that incident, but that he will be put in a lineup.
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