Michael Palacios, 31, was arrested after cellphone video showed him grabbing an ax from his backpack, destroying property and terrorizing customers inside the Delancey Street fast food restaurant just before 2:30 a.m. Ruben G, an Uber Eats delivery driver who witnessed the fight, told The Post that the fight started after Palacios was rejected by the unidentified woman. Michael Palacios has been identified as the man who destroyed the McDonald’s property in Manhattan. @kiddlite21 via McgooShakes/Twitter “So he basically got into a fight with a girl and then the girl rejected him. She didn’t want to talk to him. He continued to take her… that’s when the guys he was with came in and started arguing. It all led to this,” Reuben said. “He was trying to talk to her and everything else. He was asking for her number, where she was from, and I guess she felt something. She responded in a specific way that she didn’t want to give out too much information and he kept pushing.” Alcohol also played a role in the would-be pickup artist’s failure to impress the woman, according to Ruben. “He was drunk. He was talking to me. I can smell the booze on him,” said the Uber Eats driver, who was at the Lower East Side McDonald’s again Saturday night. Palacios is seen on video being punched by three men before calmly retrieving the axe, smashing through a floor-to-ceiling glass panel and smashing through several tables and walls. The rampage occurred at the McDonald’s location on Delancey Street in Manhattan. William Farrington Palace destroyed a table, a glass wall and punched a hole in the wall. William Farrington He then slaps one of the men he was fighting with earlier out of his chair – and approaches a frightened woman sitting at a table to shout: “Don’t be afraid of me, be afraid of him!” After the rampage, Palacios fled the scene on his bicycle, but was apprehended a short time later by police on nearby Ludlow Street, the driver said. “Brother, there was a glass here and a glass there. He broke them both. He broke the table in half with the axe.” A restaurant worker said he had never seen the suspect before, but was not shocked by the violence, which he said is “common in the area.” The worker, who declined to give his name, said the damage “was extensive” and the situation was above his salary. “The higher ups can deal with that,” he quipped. Meanwhile, outside the McDonald’s location on Saturday night, a risk-taking woman kicked over a rubbish bin. Palacios, a Bronx resident, was charged with felonies and three counts of menacing and two counts of criminal possession of a weapon. When reached for comment by The Post, the suspect initially declined to speak before bragging about the millions of views the video had generated on social media – where he was dubbed the “ax man.”
