Perseus Salichs, a 33-year-old man, stepped out into the cold just before dawn on December 19, 2017, after a late night at the Tonic Bar off Seventh Avenue near Times Square. The bar had been letting out, the sidewalk filling with the last surge of holiday-party energy—friends lingering, strangers brushing past each other, the city still loud even at that hour.
Outside, what should have been an ordinary moment turned jagged.
Witness accounts and investigators’ early summaries described Salichs encountering an upset woman and a man near her; in the confusion, words escalated and Salichs became drawn into the dispute. Police later said the gunman displayed a firearm and, moments later, fired a single shot into Salichs’ head/forehead at close range, then ran off on foot up Seventh Avenue. A bystander who rushed in described blood on her hands as she tried to check his pulse and start CPR amid the panic. Paramedics took Salichs to NYC Health + Hospitals/Bellevue, where he was pronounced dead.
In the first days, detectives worked the scene like a puzzle laid out on the pavement—searching for surveillance footage, tracing the movements of people who had spilled out of the bar, and trying to understand why a stranger would fire so casually in a place that never truly sleeps. Investigators initially considered whether the shooter and victim knew one another, but reporting at the time indicated that, after interviews, police began leaning toward the idea that they were strangers and that the distraught woman outside was the link between them.
By December 23, the NYPD publicly identified Christopher Rivas as a person of interest, releasing a description and asking for help locating him. Days later, authorities announced he had been taken into custody and accused him of pulling the trigger—an arrest that shifted the story from a frantic manhunt to the slow grind of court. Rivas was charged in connection with the killing, including murder, and prosecutors also lodged drug-related counts reported at the time as criminal possession of a controlled substance and marijuana possession.
Years later, the case reached its blunt conclusion in sentencing. Reporting in 2022 stated that Rivas had been convicted of murder in Salichs’ death and was sentenced to 23 years to life in state prison for the shooting outside the now-defunct Tonic Bar, with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office having sought a longer term. Other coverage of the sentencing described the courtroom’s raw emotion, with Salichs’ family confronting the permanence of what happened on that sidewalk near Times Square—an argument, a flash of a gun, one shot, and a life ended in an instant.
