Man who jumped out of freezer, attacked staff at New York restaurant was double murder suspect

The sudden death during a Sunday brunch at Sarabeth's on the upper west side was bizarre enough. A man burst from a freezer, lunged at an employee with a kitchen knife, then dropped dead of a heart attack.

The story deepened Monday when police identified the deceased as 54-year-old Carlton Henderson of Cave Creek, Arizona.

Until last week, Henderson was locked in a jail in Boston, where he was the prime suspect in a 30-year-old unsolved double murder.

Henderson was charged in June 2017 with two counts of first-degree murder for the 1988 killings of William Medina and Antonio Dos Reis in Roxbury, Massachusetts, and arrested that same month. He had been transferred to Boston where he was awaiting trial.

A judge in Boston released Henderson on his own recognizance Wednesday of last week on procedural grounds after his defense attorney successfully moved to suppress evidence. He was due back in court next week.

Instead, for a reason police don’t know, Henderson came to New York.

Police said he checked into an upper west side hotel Sunday morning and then is seen on surveillance video entering the walk-in freezer at Sarabeth’s on Amsterdam and 80th Street. He was in there for what a police source said was a short amount of time.

"It’s not like he was in the freezer forever," the source said.

Around 11 a.m. an employee opened the freezer. That’s when Henderson jumped out and attacked an employee with the knife, yelling "Away Satan!"

Other workers wrestled him to the floor and grabbed away the knife before Henderson went into cardiac arrest.

Paramedics tried to resuscitate Henderson in the ambulance on Amsterdam Avenue, after they wheeled him out on a stretcher past groups of people waiting to eat brunch.

He was later pronounced dead at St. Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital.

Sarabeth's had been open for three hours before the attack occurred, but was closed while police investigated the incident. The manager said he is grateful that no one was injured. The restaurant is open again and serving customers.

"Our team handled the incident bravely and effectively," a manager at the restaurant, Sarabeth's, told ABC News.

Henderson had no known ties to New York and no criminal history in the state.

The investigation continues.

ABC News' Sofia Grimsgard contributed to this report