Cop-killer Manuel Rosales was stalking his estranged wife for four days — sleeping on the roof of the Bronx building where she was staying — before he vowed to kill her and predicted he would die in a shootout with police, says a friend of the woman.
Rosales — who killed NYPD Sgt. Paul Tuozzolo before being shot dead by police on Nov. 4 — had told Tia Giattino hours earlier that he was going to kill her and predicted he would die “in a blaze of glory” at the hands of cops, according to the friend, who was letting Giattino stay with her in her Van Nest building.
“According to the security camera, he was here for four days sleeping on the roof,” the friend, who asked to remain anonymous, told The Post. “He was watching us.”
Rosales had learned where Giattino was staying after seeing a Facebook video of her that showed nearby businesses.
“We were all set to go out shopping, and I opened the door, and he pushed himself in,” the friend said, adding that Rosales had waited until after her husband left.
“I was pinned behind the door. Tia was here with the baby and my 13-year-old daughter.”
Rosales “kept saying ‘suicide by cop,’” she recalled.
The ex-con snatched Giattino’s phone from her, then told the friend she was lucky to be alive.
“He said, ‘Thank your daughter for your life, because I came here to kill you, kill Tia, take my son to my mother and go after Tia’s mother,’” she recalled.
Rosales terrorized them for four hours.
“He went through his rantings and ravings — how he’s texting her and she’s not responding,” the friend recalled. “He’s just angry. He was waving the gun, and that’s what scared me.”
The friend eventually persuaded him to put down the gun and even made him breakfast. All the while, Rosales was trying to get his wife to leave with him.
“I made him feel like he was my friend and stayed calm and cool for my daughter’s sake,” the friend said. “And I made them feel that they would get back together.”
At one point, he pleaded with her for forgiveness in the kitchen.
“Promise me on your mother’s soul you won’t call the cops,” he asked, according to the friend.
“I promised,” the friend recalled, “and said under my breath, ‘Please, Mommy, forgive me.’”
At 2:40 p.m., the woman told Rosales her husband was due home in 10 to 15 minutes.
“I said, ‘Let me call you in a few days, and we will go out to dinner and fix this,’” she recalled. “He gave me a hug when he left, which made me feel disgusted.”
As soon as he left, she called police while Giattino and the children hid in the bathroom.
They immediately heard sirens.
“Everything happened so fast,” the woman said. “When I hung up, we heard all of the shots. I knew right away it involved him.”
“There were three shots, then a pause, then what sounded like 1,000 shots,” she said.
Rosales was gunned down by police in his SUV after shooting Tuozzolo and another sergeant, Emmanuel Kwo, who survived.“Tia said, ‘Oh, my God, he’s gone,’” the friend recalled. “I hoped they had got him.”
“The anger I have towards this man, you can’t print the words,” she said. “I’m glad this man is gone. I’m glad he’s never going to come back.”
She says she prays every night for Tuozzolo.
“It’s heartbreaking,” she said tearfully. “From the bottom of my heart, I want to express my deepest, deepest, deepest condolences.”
Last week thousands of cops lined the streets to say goodbye to Tuozzolo:
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Alleged cop killer was out on $1K bail after threatening to kill wife.
He was a ticking time bomb.
Bipolar cop-killer Manuel Rosales had been in and out of prison before threatening to murder his estranged wife this past summer — yet still landed a measly $1,000 bail for the domestic incident, even over the objections of the DA, according to court records and officials.
“He threatened to kill me over and over. He said, ‘I’m going to come over there and kill everyone. It’s your own fault our son will not have you because you don’t respect me,’ ” Rosales’s estranged wife, Tia, said in a June 15 court complaint.
“I’m very afraid of Manuel and his threats. He beats me and has threatened to kill me before. He has said to me that he can’t wait to kill me. … I am so afraid of him,” she said, according to the complaint.
A warrant was signed June 29 for Manuel Rosales’s arrest based on the complaint, which alleged that he was in violation of an order of protection that his wife took out against him in January 2015.
But authorities were having trouble locating the ex-con.
He was living out of his car — a 2012 Nissan Altima — and authorities wrote in the warrant that he had a “history of running from police and resisting arrest.’’
So Rosales remained free, and June 30, he was at it again with his wife, records show.
She went with him to Adventureland in Farmingdale, LI, with their 2-year-old son, Antonio. The trouble started around 10 p.m., when the tot began crying because he didn’t want to leave, Tia Rosales said in complaint dated July 1.
Rosales shouted at Antonio to stop crying, and, “I told him to relax, he was just a kid. Manuel started cursing at me and saying he was gonna pound me if I kept talking,” she said, according to the document.
“He just drove around Bohemia for a while, yelling at me. All of a sudden, Manuel grabbed the hair at the back of my head and started whipping my head back and forth. He was cursing at me about all kinds of things from the past.
“I was telling him to get out of the car. Eventually, he just pulled the car over and got out. I jumped in the driver’s seat, and he came over to the passenger side and took the car key and threw it.“He was trying to punch me but, I was able to kick at him to keep him back. I started beeping my horn to get someone to help me, and he ran off.”
The complaint ticked off other clashes between the pair including in 2012, when Manual “harassed’’ her, and in December 2014, when he “assaulted” her and “caused injury to her face.”
Asked if her husband ever beat her while she was pregnant, the wife checked off the box for “yes.”
She also carried around a panic alarm from a previous domestic-violence incident involving him, the document says.
Manuel Rosales was finally arrested July 30 on both incidents and charged with harassment in the second degree and criminal contempt in the second degree, records show.
Suffolk County District Court Judge Pierce Cohalan arraigned Rosales the same day.
The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office “requested that bail be set at $20,000 cash with no bond alternative,” said DA Thomas Spota in a statement Monday.
“Despite our bail request, the Judge set a bail amount of $2,000 or $1,000 cash which the defendant posted,” the DA said.
Court records include a July 31 bail receipt for $1,000, paid for by a Karen Rosales at Manuel’s family home in Brentwood, LI.
A man answering the phone there Monday hung up on The Post.
Rosales was supposed to next appear in court on the charges Nov. 16.
But he killed NYPD Sgt. Paul Tuozzolo and injured another officer Friday in The Bronx and was then fatally shot by cops. He had been terrorizing his wife and her family earlier for hours.
Manuel Rosales had been arrested 17 times since 1998 in Suffolk, mostly for minor offenses. Over the years, he’d been in and out of state prison three times for offenses including stealing a car.
His wife railed on Facebook on Sunday that she blames the system for not keeping him locked up. According to the New York Times, he had been diagnosed as bipolar at age 15.
“Manny should never have been on the street in the condition he was in,’’ Tia Rosales wrote.
“Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office was aware of his condition mentally when he was arraigned for his last arrest. Instead of taking proper measure, a gross negligence occurred and he was released.”
“If anyone is truly to blame for this tragedy, I blame Suffolk County District court and the judge who let him walk out of there knowing he was in mental distress, knowing he needed immediate psychiatric care.’’
The DA’s office did not address the accusation. Judge Cohalan did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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