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The NYPD cop who famously stared down a 425-pound tiger named Ming in an East Harlem apartment in 2003 is showing he still knows how to talk New Yorkers off the ledge.
Emergency Service Detective Marty Duffy and his partner saved a woman threatening to kill herself this month on a pier at West 125th and the Hudson, new video obtained by The Post shows.
“I’m very sorry. I didn’t catch your name because of the wind,” Duffy, of ESU Truck 2, told the unidentified woman in an effort to get closer to her and eventually grab her.
Duffy, who has nearly three decades on the job, and his partner, John Medina, responded to a 911 call about a woman who was standing on the outside ledge of the pier on Oct. 6.
Medina immediately got the woman talking.
“She’s like, ‘I’m suicidal,’” Duffy told The Post. “My God is telling me to kill myself.”
He then asked her if she’d been to church lately while moving closer and telling her he couldn’t hear her over the wind.
“So she turns around and sees me and I say the same thing,” Duffy recalled.
“And she kind of looks down and she’s distracted,” he said. “I’m like… it’s now or never, and I kind of gave John the hi sign and I grabbed her and then John came over and grabbed her with me.”
At that point, the woman reached into her left pocket and Duffy asked what she had there.
The two men lifted her over the pier’s railing and took her into custody with other cops who by then had arrived on the scene.
“You have to use critical thinking and decide, ‘If a chance arises to save her life, we have to take that chance,’” Duffy said. “So, it worked. It worked out great for her because she didn’t end up in the Hudson.”
Duffy won some fame, even though the humble cop rejects it, for the case of Ming on Oct. 4, 2003.
Duffy was among dozens of cops who responded after getting a call about a tiger inside an East Harlem apartment.
The tiger’s owner, Antoinne Yates, went to the hospital claiming a pit bull had bitten him. But doctors knew it wasn’t a dog bite and cops were sent to the Drew Hamilton Houses.
“I was very, very young cop (in ESU) at the time,” he said, noting that he was with a more senior police officer.
He recalled that officers decided to cut holes in the wall of an adjoining apartment to try and figure out where the cat was.
“I felt bad that we kind of displaced a mom and her young son,” Duffy said. “But, like, who has ever encountered a tiger before and like how do we broach this carefully and safely for everybody?”
The cops made a plan to lower Duffy and another officer to different areas outside of the building to dart Ming.
“I was lowered from the 7th floor down to the 5th floor,” Duffy recalled. “I heard him at one point. … I see him, and the window’s ajar because of the child gates. That’s my time.
“Don’t embarrass yourself,” he recalled thinking in the moment. “You’re brand new to the unit… Don’t miss.”
“I didn’t miss, and I was able to successfully dart Ming, and again, it was just, it was a whole team effort,” Duffy stressed.
Ming was taken out of the building and transported to an animal sanctuary in Ohio, Duffy said. He died of natureal causes in 2019.
Truck 2, which covers all of Manhattan north of 59th Street, tackles every kind of job there is, Duffy said.
“We have everything,” said Duffy, who followed in his father’s footsteps as a detective in the NYPD and carries his shield number. “We have our perp jobs, we have our EDP (Emotionally Disturbed Person) jobs, we have our water jobs. We’re a busy truck.”