A former Broadway dancer, accused of causing the tragic death of a retired teacher by pushing him down a Manhattan subway staircase, had shared a concerning message online prior to a series of erratic incidents.
In July of last year, Rhamell Burke, 32, posted a troubling message on Facebook, stating, “Sorry, I had a MANIC EPISODE. Do U still wanna f–k me?” This foreshadowed a period of instability that resulted in multiple arrests.
By February, Burke, who once had a promising career, faced the first of four peculiar arrests. These events culminated in a murder charge following the captured-on-camera assault of 76-year-old retired teacher Ross Falzone at Chelsea’s 18th Street station last Thursday.
The shocking video footage reveals an assailant approaching Falzone from behind and forcefully pushing him, causing him to fall headlong onto the concrete steps.
At the time of the incident, Burke was reportedly wearing a wristband from Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward. He had been admitted there earlier that day after police responded to a call regarding an emotionally disturbed person.
After the attack, Burke fled the scene but appeared in court the following morning for an unrelated assault charge. He was released after the hearing, as authorities had not yet linked him to the subway incident.
NYPD detectives later spotted him at Penn Station and recognized him from surveillance images as Falzone’s alleged attacker. Burke was arrested and is now being held without bail on a second-degree murder rap.
It was an unnerving fall from fame.
Burke had posed with movie stars and was part of the ensemble of the hit Broadway show “King Kong” until 2019, before a friend said he lost it during the COVID pandemic.
In recent months, some of his online posts hinted at increasingly erratic behavior.
“Show your work: Torment vs. Torture,” he wrote on Facebook on April 30 — adding in what would be his final post, “From your soon to be Father of Philosophical Existentialism (think Toth or Hermes).”
Burke had been arrested by the NYPD four times since February, including for a meltdown at the Seventh Avenue and West 23rd Street station in Chelsea on Feb. 14, when cops responded to a report of a man with a shovel who allegedly smashed several doors and threw a trash can onto the tracks.
Three Port Authority cops were injured while making the arrest.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani told reporters Friday that he would called on the city’s hospital system to review its psychiatric evaluation process and discharge protocols to determine why Burke was released before the attack.
In a statement Monday, a City Hall rep told The Post that officials are “going through the review process right now” and added that the city hospital system and state health officials are also investigating.
Additional reporting by Matthew Fischetti
