'New York Fugitive' Who Took Selfie Atop Brooklyn Bridge Arrested in Chattanooga

Photo via David Karnauch/Instagram.

UPDATE: An NYPD spokesman confirms to Patch that Karnauch was taken into custody in Tennessee on Monday. Next, a Tennessee judge will decide if Karnauch should be allowed to waive extradition. (“Probably tomorrow,” police say.) Depending on that ruling, the defendant could be traveling to Brooklyn to be processed in a local court within the next few days. “And by the way,” says the NYPD spokesman, “he didn’t climb all the way to the top.”

David Karnauch, 21, best known throughout the New York City area for a June 30 selfie he took atop the Brooklyn Bridge, has reportedly been arrested in his hometown of Chattanooga, Tenn., and is being held as a “fugitive from New York.”

Local news station WRCBTV reports that Karnauch was ”wanted for reckless endangerment in 2nd degree.”

Back when Karnauch uploaded the photo, NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence and Counterterrorism John J. Miller held a heated news conference to address the epic selfie, according to NBC New York.

“He looked at that and he said, ‘Damn, I’m not getting around that, so I’ll take my selfie stick and I’ll take this stupid picture and I’ll put it on my website,’ but that’s as far as he got,” said Miller, calling Karnauch a “knucklehead.”

He reiterated: “If he’d stayed there probably a couple more minutes to get that shot, the roving patrols on the bridge, which are there all the time, would have arrested him or summonsed him as they had had others who have done the same stupid thing,” he said.

(And Miller would know — the counterterrorism chief himself spelunked to the peak of the Brooklyn Bridge’s two towers last summer to investigate the removal of two American flags.)

Karnauch, meanwhile, told NBC that no one stopped or questioned him on the way to the top. “You could just get on a beam and it actually had handrails on the left and right side,” he said, “and I just walked across the bridge and turned around to take a picture.”

Sometime on Monday, after news of his arrest broke, Karnauch Instagram page — filled with dozens of photos of aerial selfie stunts — went dark.

Patch has reached out to both the NYPD and the Chattanooga Police Department for details.