New York Post - April 23, 2004
PARK SEX DUO GETS COPS UP TREE By MARK BULLIET and ERIKA MARTINEZ
A pre-op transsexual and "her" male lover yesterday stripped off their clothes, climbed up a Central Park tree, then spent four hours engaging in sex acts and pelting would-be rescuers with profanity and branches.
It took four hours before police hostage negotiators talked the pair into descending from their three-story-high perch in a larch tree near Wollman Rink.
"It's a treesome," one cop said of the loony lovebirds, who were whisked off to the psychiatric ward at Cornell Medical Center. The arboreal aberration attracted hundreds of gawkers and left dozens of emergency personnel stumped.
Firefighters set up an inflatable rescue mattress around the base of the tree, where the pair had left their clothes and a plastic bag filled with what cops called an assortment of drugs.
The Parks Department sent in two cherry-picker trucks. Emergency Service Unit cops ascended in harnesses. Police hostage negotiators recorded their demands: One Diet Vanilla Pepsi.
But up in the larch tree - a rare evergreen with pine-like needles - the 32-year-old, female-breasted transsexual in a purple thong continued cursing, and her 17-year-old blond boyfriend in boxer shorts cowered in apparent fright.
Both were heard shouting that they have AIDS and that their parents disapproved of them. Both remained uncooperative - except, and apparently to an extreme, with each other. Even the Pepsi bottle was flung back down.
The two finally boughed out of their misadventure at around 8:30 p.m.
"We thought it was an ecological statement for Earth Day, but it's just transvestites," said Brian Mallard, 26, of Long Island City.
Additional reporting by Zach Haberman