You Could Call It “Corporal Punishment” But In The Legal World It Also Known As “Assault With A Deadly Weapon”

More details emerged over the weekend about the Queens PE coach who pulled a knife on his students. Another child — an autistic boy — has come forward claiming the gym teacher did the same thing to him:

The 17-year-old autistic boy told investigators that Mark Omeltchenko, 45, pointed a knife at his neck and put him in a headlock during the same workout session in which the teacher allegedly threatened two other students, law-enforcement sources said.

The new complaint says the boy — like the two girls, ages 14 and 15, in his Aviation HS class — didn’t want to participate in drills Thursday morning and that set off the teacher, according to a spokesman for District Attorney Richard Brown.

“When the student refused to do the exams, the defendant displayed a knife at the [student] and pointed the knife at the student’s neck while grabbing him and placing him in a headlock,” the spokesman said, reading from the complaint.

. . .

Omeltchenko was reassigned by the Department of Education pending a “corporal-punishment investigation.”

Bedbugs Don’t Wait For Midterms Now, Do They?

In other bedbug news, first-year Columbia students are being evacuated from their dorms in order to battle another bedbug infestation:

Five first-years have discovered that they might not be the only residents living in their John Jay singles.

Yaw Awiah, CC ’09, reported bedbugs in his room on the 13th floor to Housing and Dining Services last Friday morning, and was asked to leave the building later that day. By Monday, at the start of one of the most stressful weeks of the semester, Housing asked Shira Burton, CC ’09, Nikhil Gupta, SEAS ’09, Andrew Tillett-Saks, CC ’09, and Ian Vo, SEAS ’09, to evacuate their rooms on the 12th through 14th floors by Wednesday night. Their temporary move to Hartley Hall is a precautionary measure to prevent the further spread of a bedbug infestation discovered on the building’s 13th floor.

In order to evacuate, students must clean all bedding and clothing and completely empty their rooms in order for exterminators to fumigate thoroughly. Housing gave each student $25 in Flex dollars to pay for laundry fees.

“We’re trying to be very aggressive about it,” said Director of Housing Services Herman Matte. “We take it as a huge urgency. It’s inconvenient to the students, but we want to remedy the situation as quickly as possible.”

But in a surprise move, the students actually seem less concerned about the infestation than they are about their midterm exams:

Students, however, have other priorities during midterms week.

“It seems like Housing and Dining couldn’t be any more disconnected from the academic branch of the school,” Burton said. “Would it really make such a big difference if we had to be moved out by Saturday morning? Couldn’t they fumigate over spring break, when, even if people are staying at Columbia, they won’t have academic schedules to be disrupted?”

The Good News Is You Get To Sit In A Bar All Night And Interview People . . . The Bad News Is It’s The Place They Last Saw Her Alive

Reporters hang out in bar all night gawking at gawkers and unsettling the unaware:

Night was a shadow of itself at the Pioneer bar on the Bowery. It was mostly the morbidly curious or the unaware who turned up on Friday to toss back drinks in the next-to-last place a 24-year-old woman was seen alive exactly one week earlier.

. . .

It was 10:40 p.m. The bar, at 218 Bowery, had the atmosphere of a sparsely attended school mixer. Shadows outnumbered people. Stools wore layers of coats and wraps, like summer furniture covered for winter. Mick Jagger sang on the sound system.

People celebrating their birthday in such a place hopefully fell into the “unaware” category:

A woman with a gray sweater tied around her waist celebrated her birthday with a smattering of friends and friends of friends. A sallow-faced man who said he worked for the government said two women from the group had already left, fearful of not getting home safely.

Was this night like the night Imette St. Guillen disappeared? It was hard to say. A week earlier, when Ms. St. Guillen crossed this room, it was so crowded that people needed to walk sideways. Now it was empty enough that a quarter on the floor lay in plain view.

Still, though fewer in number, the players performed the usual barroom scenes. Near the mirrored wall, where newspaper and television reporters were staked out at tables, a tall woman with her blond hair in a ponytail leaned into a stocky man dressed in black. They kissed. He rested his hand on her backside. The reporters talked among themselves.

More in the unaware camp:

The birthday party dwindled, and a wedding party fresh from a rehearsal dinner arrived. They were young and well dressed and strolled in with authority. A woman in cream pants slipped off her red wool coat, revealing a halter top and the glow of skin, and heads swiveled. An Ohioan named Brian Blitz, 25, stole two glances at her shoulders.

“This is the bar?” a woman visiting from Chicago asked, eyes wide. She had heard of Ms. St. Guillen’s slaying.

It had been too late to change the site of the post-rehearsal gathering.

There’s Always Something A Little Off With Tax Attorneys

A Cravath, Swaine and Moore* tax attorney is a fugitive from justice after having sexual relationships (technical term: “rape”) with two sisters — one as young as 13. Oh, and their mother apparently pimped them out:

A tax attorney for one of the country’s most prestigious law firms has gone into hiding as he faces monstrous pedophilia charges — alleging that for six years, he paid a mother for sex with her two underage daughters in his Midtown pied-a-terror.

The disgraced attorney — who has traveled as far as Toronto while dodging rape charges worth up to seven years’ prison — is James Patrick Colliton, recently fired from his position as associate partner at the 187-year-old firm of Cravath, Swaine and Moore.

Colliton gave his 13- and 15-year-old victims money and cellphones so he could keep them at his beck and call as well as paying their mother, law-enforcement sources said. Investigators have turned up more unaccounted-for cellphones in Colliton’s name, and they’re now checking whether he gave those phones to still more young victims.

. . .

The 41-year-old father of five from Poughkeepsie began his depraved relationship with the older sister in 2000, when she was 15, prosecutors said. She apparently “aged out” in 2004, when she turned 19. So Colliton paid the girl’s 13-year-old sister, prosecutors said.

The six years of weekly, no-holds-barred sex sessions took place in Colliton’s depraved lust nest at East 56th Street at Park Avenue, the indictment charges.

To make the story still more revolting, the two girls were being pimped out to Colliton by their own money-grabbing mother, 38, who is herself in custody on prostitution promotion charges, according to lead prosecutors Ann Donnelly and Rachel Hochhauser.

The police aren’t happy about this detail:

Police have been hunting for Colliton since Feb. 16, when he failed to turn himself in to Manhattan prosecutors, as he’d promised through his lawyer, prosecutors said.

Acting on a tip, cops with the Toronto fugitive squad arrested him, transferring custody on Tuesday to the United States.

According to an NYPD source, at 3:10 p.m. on Tuesday, cops told the Department of Homeland Security that computer records indicated Colliton was not a fugitive — but that they’d keep checking.

Then, at 3:28 p.m., the NYPD called back and told Homeland Security that they’d confirmed Colliton’s fugitive status through other means — only to learn that the feds had prematurely let him go.

A spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection said she could not comment.

*Suffice it to say, one of those firms where you can perform online searches for attorneys by which law school he or she attended.

If You’re Going To Kill Over Sporting Events, At Least Make It Short Track Skating Or Perhaps Even The 4X10 Kilometer Cross-Country Relay

The worst thing about this story is that no one — including the players! — actually gives a shit about the all-star game:

A Brooklyn teen stabbed his best friend to death — telling cops a “stupid argument” about the NBA All-Star Game triggered the bloody violence, authorities said yesterday.

Naquan Butts, 19, and Michael Bethune, 18, were watching the game with a couple of friends in Butts’ Crown Heights apartment Sunday night, when Butts and Bethune began arguing.

It started with each choosing a different team and claiming it was going to win, Butts told police.

Then, he said, the trash talk turned physical and they found themselves tussling right out the apartment door and into the 10th-floor hallway at about 11:45 p.m.

Butts drew a knife and stabbed his pal once in the chest, police said.

The mortally wounded Bethune stumbled into the elevator, but went nowhere before collapsing inside.

He was pronounced dead at Interfaith Hospital at 12:50 a.m. yesterday.