New York Daily News - Axl Busted

New York Daily News - July 13, 1992

BUSTED AXL! Guns N' Roses rocker nabbed at JFK

Nip Rose in bud of tour Axl nabbed at JFK Airport on St. Louis warrant

The gig is up for fugitive rocker Axl Rose.

After three months on the lam, the Guns N' Roses lead singer was arrested yestereday at JFK airport on assault and property damage charges stemming from a riot last July at a St. Louis concert, authorities said.

Rose, traveling with his girlfriend, supermodel Stephanie Seymour, her young son and a nanny, arrived from Paris in the morning aboard an Air France Concorde. He was nabbed by Customs agents acting on a warrant issued by St. Louis prosecutors, Port Authority police said.

Rose and the popular hard rock band, infamous for their volatile personalities, had just wrapped up a six week European tour said Rose's publicist Bryn Bridenthal.

But for weeks before the European swing, Guns N' Roses had dropped a slew of U.S. shows, and Rose virtually went underground after finding out St. Louis police had issued a warrant for his arrest.

Rose, 30, was charged with four counts of misdemeanor assault and one count of damage to property. He faces a maximum of one year in jail on each charge.

The scrappy rocker was being held at Queens Central Booking and was scheduled to be arraigned late last night. St. Louis police said they would try to extradite Rose for prosecution.

"Of coure, Axl will fight that every step of the way," Bridenthal said, "It would be much nicer to go voluntarily without handcuffs."

U.S. Tour in Jeapordy - The lead singer's arrest could jeopardize the much-ballyhooed second leg of Guns N' Roses' U.S. Tour, which is slated to begin Friday and include two dates at Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands. Bridenthal said Rose had planned to see Seymour to her Manhattan apartment, then fly to St. Louis early this week to surrender to authorities. "He was going to turn himself in and get this all worked out before the tour" Bridenthal said. "This is only four misdemeanor charges, it's not a murder trial," she said.

The charges were logged by St. Louis authorities after Rose dived into the crowd during a July 3, 1991 concert and the show collapsed into a $200,000 wave of fan destruction.