
Twisted man who 'beat up woman on NYC bike path' was out on PAROLE for rape
Miguel Jiraud, 30, was charged with attempted murder at his arraignment hearing on Friday for allegedly beating Diana Aguelo, 44, of Astoria, Queens, while she was biking home on Randall's Island around 11:30pm on May 16.
The vicious attack left the single mother-of-two unconscious and in a coma and in need of two emergency surgeries, including removing part of her skull.
'She almost died...they had to resuscitate her,' her daughter, Stephanie Rodas, 21, sobbed to the New York Post. 'She's still in critical condition right now – even though she came through the second one, thank God she did.'
Jiraud was on parole for a rape charge at the time of the attack and was wearing an ankle monitor, which police used to help trace him before his arrest on Friday.
The rapist allegedly called police after the attack to let them know where Agudelo was six hours after he attacked her, sources told The Post.
Police later found her stolen e-bike near the East River and Jiraud's ankle monitor indicated that he was traveling around 16 mph near the scene, sources told The Post.
It later showed that he went back to where Aguedelo was and where he called 911.
Jiraud was on parole for a rape charge at the time of the attack and was wearing an ankle monitor, which police used to help trace him before his arrest on Friday
Jiraud, who was living in a homeless shelter on the island, insisted to police that he just 'found her' and that he was not the source of the crime.
'I was the one that found her and stood there for an hour and went to work late,' he later told a reporter who asked if he beat her, before showing his unmarred hands.
The mother-of-two, who remains unconscious, suffered facial fractures, a cracked skull, and a broken nose after the attack.
Her own daughter didn't recognize her when she saw her for the first time after the attack, she told the New York Daily News.
'She was so swollen you couldn't even recognize her,' she told the outlet. 'Her eye was black, pitch-black. When you opened her eye, it was bloodshot red. She couldn't even move. She couldn't talk. She was on life support. She was a bloody mess.'
NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny called the beating 'one of the worst beatings I've ever seen.'
Rodas was informed by doctors her mother could 'succumb to her injuries at any time,' she told the New York Daily News.
Doctors fear the 44-year-old won't be able to use the right side of her body and could lose vision in one eye. She may also suffer from life-long seizure problems, The Post reported.
'She will have memory issues. We don't know what we she will remember. There's a possibility that she could forget about me,' the 21-year-old cried to The Daily News.
Agudelo's workplace, the Museum of the City of New York, started a GoFundMe.
'Our thoughts are with Diana, her loved ones, and our colleagues during this difficult time,' it wrote in a Facebook post.
'We are devastated that Diana Agudelo, a cherished member of our staff at the Museum of the City of New York, was violently attacked while biking home through Randall's Island.'
The fundraiser has garnered more than $51,000 as of Saturday morning.
Jiraud was previously convicted of raping a 28-year-old woman in February 2011 when he was 16 years old. He choked the woman on a Bronx rooftop before sexually assaulting her.
He was released on parole for the crime in August and it is set to expire in 2040, sources told The Post.
He was convinced in 2013 with a sentence of 12 years.
'What's the point of parole if it's not protecting anyone?' Rodas questioned to The Post. 'It's more like giving them freedom for what? To do what they did to my mom.
'He went from raping someone to attempted murder, and God knows if he's going to be successful and leave me without a mom.'
The young woman, a student at John Jay College, called her mother her best friend and someone who loved music and travel, she told The Post.
She said her mother had the 'kindest and sweetest soul you've ever met.'
'If I could describe her, I would just say being around her was like eating a cupcake. It was so sweet, it would make you feel warm and good inside,' she told The Daily News.
'I just want to wake up from this bad nightmare, just wake up next to my mom. I just want to give my mom a big hug, but I can't even hold her, I can't even touch her,' she told The Post.
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The Sun
6 hours ago
- The Sun
Trolls said I was a sociopath after conman lover stole $2m from my celeb-loved restaurant, but he hijacked my brain
She was the vegan queen of New York who ended up behind bars after looting her own restaurant of millions of dollars and going on the run with her husband. In this exclusive interview, Sarma Melngailis reveals the truth behind her spectacular downfall. 11 11 11 Opening her hotel room door to investigate the noise coming from the hallway, Sarma Melngailis immediately realised it was full of police officers and detectives. 'It's her!' one shouted, before a detective marched into her room, clutching a mobile phone with a photo of Sarma on the screen and the word 'Wanted' across it. It was May 10, 2016, and after almost a year on the run with her husband Anthony Strangis, now 45, the authorities had finally caught up with Sarma in the rural tourist town of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, over 700 miles from New York, where she'd been celebrated as a groundbreaking vegan chef and restaurateur. The chef, now 52, was wanted for grand larceny and fraud, after siphoning money out of her business account and defrauding money from employees and investors in the restaurant. According to the indictment that led to her arrest, from January 2014 to January 2015 Sarma transferred more than $1.6million from her restaurant's accounts to her personal account, leaving employees unpaid and the restaurant forced to close. She then convinced four people to invest a further $844,000 to re-open the restaurant, before going on to transfer $400,000 to her personal account. Following her arrest, she pleaded guilty to the charges and spent four months in jail. Sarma's story was documented in hit Netflix show Bad Vegan, released in 2022 and watched for nearly 30 million hours in its first five days. She has now published her memoir The Girl With The Duck Tattoo, which she hopes will help people to understand exactly what happened from the moment Anthony Strangis walked into her life in 2011. It is, according to Sarma, a twisted tale of brainwashing, gaslighting, coercive control and exploitation, orchestrated by Strangis, a gambler and conman, who had used Sarma as his personal cash machine. 'By the time we were arrested, I had handed around $2million to him,' says Sarma. 'I've been called a grifter, a sociopath, stupid, and told repeatedly that I should have gotten more time in jail.' 'Him owing me money was a reason for me not to cut loose from him' Sarma and Strangis met on Twitter in late 2011. At that time, Sarma – a trained chef originally from Newton, Massachusetts – was preparing to take her wildly successful Manhattan restaurant, Pure Food And Wine, serving up raw vegan food, global. An Ivy League graduate, Sarma had a successful career as an investment banker, before deciding to give it all up and follow her dream to become a chef. Her head for figures and passion for cooking is what attracted one investor to lend her $2.1million to buy the restaurant outright. It was a success from the moment it opened its doors in the summer of 2004, with A-listers including Gisele Bündchen, Bill Clinton, Woody Harrelson and Emma Stone, flocking to enjoy her dishes. When Sarma first started exchanging messages with Strangis, he said his name was Shane Fox. 'He called himself Mr Fox. He probably recognised I was an ideal target. I had a thriving business, bringing in a lot of money, and I'd just been through a break-up, so was personally vulnerable,' she says. Online, Strangis had given Sarma the impression that he was well-travelled and successful, but never revealed what he did for a living. However, she says their first date was a let-down. 'Once I met him in person, I felt like something wasn't right, and when he left, I figured that was it – I wouldn't be seeing him again.' But Strangis wasn't going to let her go that easily, and told Sarma that he could help her financially, implying that he had huge sums stashed away in other countries. Strangis' money was tied into his employment, which he implied was working for a shadowy governmental organisation. He told Sarma he couldn't tell her what he did for a living, but kept emailing her links to US special forces operations around the world. 'There was a lot of hinting and partial information, which allowed me to make assumptions,' explains Sarma. 'If I did call him out on something, he denied it so confidently that I'd question myself. So gaslighting was definitely part of his mindf**kery.' 11 11 It was early 2012, two months after their first date, when Strangis first asked to borrow $5,000 from Sarma. 'He was never clear why he needed it, but in the beginning, he would say it was urgent, as if a matter of life and death, and that if I turned him down, something bad would happen to him. 'And so it began. He just kept borrowing. Sometimes he paid me back, but never in full – just enough to give me some degree of confidence that I'd get the rest. "But from that first time onwards, he always owed me money. I know now that his owing me money was a reason for me not to cut loose from him – he already had his hooks in me, which was exactly what he wanted.' Every time Sarma lent him money, she would transfer it from her restaurant's business account to her personal account. She says: 'He always implied that he had huge sums stashed away, but that it would take time to get to, which is why he needed to borrow from me. "At the beginning, I often asked how he acquired it. He would just tell me: 'It's better you don't know,' but assured me it was legitimate.' The pair married in late 2012. 'It was something he told me we needed to do, and he badgered me about it until I finally agreed,' Sarma remembers. I was making my way on Wall Street before I decided to go to culinary school. I'm an intelligent woman, but at this point, he had 'hijacked' my brain Sarma Melngailis By then, she had noticed a change in Strangis. He seemed to exude confidence and no longer seemed uncomfortable in New York, like he had on their first date. And he had also put on a lot of weight. 'Now, I realise that's because when he wasn't with me, he was spending most of his time sitting at casino tables or in a hotel room eating pizza and playing Call Of Duty,' says Sarma. Strangis also revealed that she was being 'tested', and if she passed the tests – which included tolerating his weight gain and giving him more money – they would be rewarded with unlimited money and immortality. Sarma realises people are amazed that she could believe such wild stories. 'I was making my way on Wall Street before I decided to go to culinary school. I'm an intelligent woman, but at this point, he had 'hijacked' my brain,' she says. Throughout 2014, Strangis continued to test Sarma by asking her to wire him more and more money. 'I transferred it from the restaurant account or even high-interest cash-advance companies to my personal account, then on to him,' she says. Between January 2014 and January 2015, Sarma transferred over $1.6million from the business accounts, but she had no idea that Strangis spent nearly $1million of it at casinos in Connecticut. He also spent $80,000 at luxury watch retailers, including Rolex and Beyer, over $70,000 at hotels in Europe and New York and over $10,000 on Uber, plus withdrew hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash. 'It was claimed that we fled on some romantic escapade with loads of money' Meanwhile, back at the restaurant, in January 2015, cheques bounced, leaving 98 workers without pay. With the staff refusing to work for free, the business closed for the first time. The following month, Sarma persuaded four new investors to plough $844,000 into the business. She used some of the money to pay back employees and settle other outstanding business costs, and the restaurant reopened in early April. According to the indictment, by that June, Sarma had transferred another $400,000 to her personal account – $100,000 she had withdrawn, while the remaining $300,000 was sent on to Foxwoods Resort Casino in Strangis' name. 11 11 11 In July, payroll was missed again, leaving 84 workers owed up to $3,500 each. The restaurant closed for a second time, and the staff picketed the location to draw attention to what was going on. With no more money from the business to plunder and now owing an additional $409,987 in sales tax, Sarma says Strangis made her leave New York. 'When he first took me away, I can recall just screaming in the car,' she reveals. 'I realise now that I was in a dissociated state. I wasn't fully there. I don't remember where we first drove to or what happened next.' Strangis drove them towards Las Vegas, via extended stays in Texas, Arizona and Missouri, where they stayed for six months, before moving on to Louisiana and ending up in Tennessee. 'The tabloids claimed that I fled on some romantic escapade and that we ran off with loads of money, but that just wasn't true. "By then, he must have blown through almost all the money,' says Sarma. 'He had bled me dry.' With very little left, the couple were relying on cash and credit cards, which is what led the police to them in Tennessee, after Strangis ordered a Domino's pizza and paid with his credit card. After their arrest, they were convicted as co-conspirators, with Strangis sentenced to a year for grand larceny, criminal tax fraud and scheming to defraud. The prosecution recommended one to three years for Sarma. However, the judge passed a sentence of nearly four months, commentating that there was plenty of evidence that she had 'tried to run her business in good faith'. It was a cult of one. The dynamics of what happened and the steps he took to lure me in and take control are essentially the same as those of an abusive cult Sarma Melngailis on Anthony Strangis In October 2017, Sarma walked free from Rikers Island prison, still jointly liable with Strangis for most of the financial damages, including just over $65,000 in unpaid wages. Sarma filed for divorce from her estranged husband in May 2018 and set about rebuilding her life. She says the opportunity to pay back wages was partly what motivated her to agree to the Netflix documentary, and when Bad Vegan was released, Sarma ensured her $75,000 fee went directly to help her out-of-pocket staff. 'My dream is to reopen Pure Food And Wine, and I'm lucky that many of my former employees want to help bring it back,' she says. Strangis has recently been the subject of Investigation Discovery show Toxic, which tracked him to Arizona. 'He conned and manipulated other people, and married a woman with the last name Knight,' says Sarma. 'I'm glad that show was made, his new name revealed and his face shown again, so people may recognise him.' 'Lure me in' Sarma still struggles to make sense of it all, but found writing her memoir cathartic to finally rid herself of 'Mr Fox'. 'I had to think about him a lot writing the book, which felt extremely uncomfortable,' she says. 'It was a cult of one. The dynamics of what happened and the steps he took to lure me in and take control are essentially the same as those of an abusive cult.' However, she is fully aware of the role she played. 'There are things about me that made it possible. "I allowed him to hurt people, but the characteristics that make us vulnerable to the Mr Foxes of this world can be positive ones. "I tend to think the best of people, and I'm trusting. I'm an introvert, so it's easier to isolate me.' Something else that has helped Sarma make sense of what happened is a journal she wrote during 2014 and 2015 that was recovered from Strangis' possessions when he was arrested. 'It helped me have more compassion for myself. I remind myself that people believe in crazy things, from alien abductions to the Loch Ness monster. "And for some reason, for me, believing in Mr Fox was a better alternative than believing a human could be capable of such cruelty. But I paid a very high price for doing so.' The Girl With The Duck Tattoo by Sarma Melngailis (Lioncrest Publishing) is out now 11 11


Daily Mail
9 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Cincinnati brawl's 'main instigator' is hauled into court for 'knocking woman unconscious' before DANCING and taunting victims
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BBC News
12 hours ago
- BBC News
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