Son of Sam serial killer David Berkowitz may have had his first taste of blood at only 17.
Five years before he went on his infamous NYC spree between 1976-77, shooting eight people and killing four, Berkowitz may have been taking aim at folks on a Bronx street, a retired Yonkers detective and a crime buff told The Post.
Detective Mike Lorenzo, whose dad worked the Berkowitz case as a Yonkers detective, and Berkowitz expert Manny Grossman, now want the NYPD to reopen the case of 16-year-old Margaret Inglesia, who was walking home from a party when she was killed at 169th Street between Morris and Grant avenues in Morrisania around 2 a.m. on Oct. 18, 1970.
The teen was struck by three .22-caliber bullets — once in the front and then twice in the back as she lay dying, according to a witness report at the time. She was one of six victims shot by the Bronx sniper on the same block over a two-month span that year. Only her shooting was fatal. No arrests were ever made.
“This is a case that needs to be reexamined,”said Lorenzo, 60, who was a Yonkers cop, for 20 years and retired in 2008. “This was Son of Sam before Son of Sam.
Lorenzo and Grossman believe young Berkowitz could have been the sniper, since he worked about a mile away at his dad’s business, Melrose Hardware at 802 Melrose Ave., from June 1970 to June 1971.
He left the store when he joined the U.S. Army.
Lorenzo and Grossman also point to the 100-yard targets found at Berkowitz’s home after his 1977 arrest, which they contend is evidence of him honing sharp-shooter skills.
“Why would he have 100-yard targets? He’s not a hunter,” said Lorenzo.
There are differences between the Bronx sniper shootings and Berkowitz’s murderous rampage, the two acknowledged: the later crimes were committed up close and personal, with Berkowitz firing his .44-caliber revolver through car windows.
They want the sniper shootings, which were committed with a .22-caliber rifle reexamined anyway.
“It wasn’t right next door to the father’s shop but it wasn’t 20 miles away or in another borough and it fits his M.O.,” Lorenzo said. “It’s the same thing as the Son of Sam killings but just a different kind of gun. Shooting into a car is sniping too.”
And Lorenzo and Grossman have uncovered an unknown Berkowitz victim in the past.
The two helped identify Wendy Savino — who was shot and gravely wounded as she sat in her car — as Berkowitz’s previously unknown first victim.
“I found out about Wendy because I found the sketch she did of her shooter that was an exact match of Berkowitz,” Grossman told The Post, which broke the Savino story last year.
J.C. Rice
“Then I found a police report that showed her shooting had all the characteristics of a Son of Sam shooting,” he said.
“I cold called her and she told me she identified Berkowitz as her shooter in 1977 right after his arrest. She never forgot his face.”
Grossman and Lorenzo brought the revelations to now-retired NYPD First Grade Detective Robert Klein, who determined Savino had been shot by Berkowitz, even though Berkowitz denied the crime to him in a prison interview, police sources said.
A smiling Berkowitz — armed with a .32-caliber gun — walked up to Savino’s brand new Jaguar parked behind Nina’s Restaurant on Boston Road in the Bronx, Savino claimed to The Post.
He began laughing as he fired five times into the vehicle.
The then 40-year-old wife of the head of the Bronx’s Republican Party survived gunshots to her face, back, arm, chest and right eye, playing dead until the shooter left. She lost the eye.
Berkowitz, 72, was arrested and eventually convicted of six counts of second-degree murder and seven counts of attempted second-degree murder and is serving 25 years to life at Shawangunk Correctional Facility in Ulster County.
Lorenzo, who retired in 2008 after 20 years, looked at the sniper shootings as possibly being connected to Berkowitz before he got involved in the Savino case, he said.
“I really think there’s something in those files,” Lorenzo said
Grossman, who hopes to get the street renamed for the 16-year-old victim, believes the case has “Berkowitz’s fingerprints all over it” but thinks it deserves a new look even if he’s not the killer.
“This is a major case that’s been forgotten,” Grossman said. “There’s a perp out there and we think it’s Berkowitz.”
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