The vigilante who opened fire at a Manhattan subway station this week — while warning a would-be mugger to leave a woman alone — posted bail and was spotted returning to his Queens home Friday morning, wearing the same clothes he was arrested in.
John Rote, 43 — who is accused of firing off two rounds at the 49th Street station in Midtown late Tuesday — was ordered held on $10,000 bail, at the request of prosecutors, during his Thursday night arraignment.
Since then, he has posted bail, according to online records.
Rote returned Friday morning to his Astoria home and apparently struggled to get inside.
He was spotted looking through paperwork before trudging off into the nearby subway station at 31st Street and 30th Avenue.
He was wearing the same olive-colored t-shirt and dark blue cargo pants he was photographed in when he was collared.
He then returned less than an hour later and went into a supermarket to purchase a bottle of water, before wandering into a local coffee shop.
Rote — who has no criminal history and has never been described as in need of mental help — was charged with criminal possession of a weapon, criminal possession of a firearm, reckless endangerment and menacing in connection to the caught-on-camera shooting, the NYPD said.
He faces three and a half years in prison if convicted, prosecutors said.
Witnesses and police said the chaotic ordeal began when Matthew Roesch, a 49-year-old homeless man held the emergency gate open for a 40-year-old woman at the Midtown station.
When she tried to walk through, he blocked her way and demanded money from her, according to court documents.
“If you don’t give me a dollar, I’m going to take your purse,” Roesch said, according to police.
She refused, and Roesch began screaming at her, the complaint said.
Cops said Rote warned the panhandler to leave the woman alone — and witnesses told officers that he then whipped out a gun and yelled “Get away from her!,” sources said.
“I’ve looked at the video and it is unusual. The shooter looks very calm, pulls out a gun, fires two shots and calmly puts the gun back in a bag and walks away,” Rich Davey, the chief of the MTA’s subway and city bus systems, said of the incident at a Wednesday news conference.
“That’s not what we need. Weapons shouldn’t be on the streets of New York, but they are,” he continued.
“We don’t tolerate this in New York City transit, period,” Davey said. “This kind of misbehavior will not be tolerated.”
No one was hit by the errant bullets.
Law enforcement sources said they don’t think Rote was aiming at the vagrant.
Rote was arrested as he sat at his work desk around 2 p.m. Wednesday at Panavision, a company on Varick Street that rents camera and filmmaking equipment, law-enforcement sources told The Post.
Officers collared him without a struggle and brought him back to the precinct, where Rote allegedly admitted that he pulled the trigger, then tossed the gun in the East River, the sources said.
At Rote’s arraignment, his defense attorney, Marie Calvert-Kilbane, said her client had legally bought the gun about 13 years ago — and argued that he was just a “concerned” citizen looking out for the safety of a fellow straphanger.
“This is not someone who was buying [guns] on the street,” Calvert-Kilbane, of New York County Defender Services, added, noting that her client was “concerned for his safety and someone else’s safety and reacted … [Rote] was really concerned for someone else.”
Meanwhile, the third-degree attempted robbery charge against Roesch carries a sentence of up to seven years.
He had been arrested in the past for selling MetroCard swipes, according to NYPD Inspector Steven Hill, the commanding officer of the Transit Borough Manhattan.