‘Punching bag’ Rex Heuermann ‘really scared’ peers: former classmates

Gilgo Beach murders suspect Rex Heuermann was an awkward loner who “really scared” his peers and “got picked on a lot,” former classmates say.

“I was really scared of him. He was the type of guy if he snapped, he could really hurt you,” Berner High School graduate John Parisi told the New York Times of the 59-year-old, who was charged earlier this month with multiple counts of murder related to the deaths of three women between 2007 and 2010.

“He was disillusioned and he was misguided. You had to be very careful,” Parisi continued, adding that the gangly adolescent was “everybody’s punching bag.”

“He got picked on a lot. He would take it and take it and walk away. I seen him pushed to his limit,” Parisi recalled.

Parisi remembered a specific incident when a then-preteen Heuermann was “singled out” and set upon by cruel sixth-grade classmates.

The physical bullying stopped when a teacher intervened, he said, but students continued to make fun of Heuermann well into high school.

“He was a recluse, very quiet,” another former classmate, Don Ophals, told the Times.

“When I heard they arrested him, I was not surprised at all.”

Fellow Berner alum John DeMecoli recalled trying to recruit Heuermann into his friends’ street hockey game, to no avail.

“He just didn’t want any part of it, he didn’t want any part of sports,” he said.

“He didn’t want any part of anything.

“[He] didn’t have the social skills to hold a conversation — just a very weird character … he had a mean streak in him.”

“[Heuermann was] an outcast,” another childhood acquaintance, Dan Musto, agreed.

Actor Billy Baldwin graduated from Berner alongside Heuermann in 1981, and also remembered him from middle school.

“He was a bit shy, a bit insecure, a bit uncomfortable,” he told the outlet of his former classmate. 

“I wouldn’t say he was an outcast but he struggled to fit in and to find his crowd.”

In yearbook photos, Heuermann appears as a tall, unassuming teen with disheveled hair and large glasses.

One female classmate, however, previously alleged that he almost killed her with a misguided prank during a 1980 production of “Arsenic and Old Lace.”

According to Musto, everyone at school knew Heuermann had a difficult home life, and frequently clashed with his father — particularly after he was allegedly busted for shoplifting.

“Why is he getting in trouble? He’s fighting with his dad. It was common knowledge,’ he explained.

Heuermann was 12 when his father died in 1975, according to the Times.

He and his siblings — including his brother, Craig, who later served time in prison for fatally running down a police captain while drunk and high — were raised by their mother, Dolores, now 93.

Still, Heuermann’s unhappy childhood never elicited sympathy from his peers.

“That was just how it was at that time. You played the cards you were dealt,” Ophals shrugged.

Heuermann’s former classmates divulged their memories of him at the Berner High School Class of 1983’s 40th reunion, which took place at a pub just a few days after the bombshell arrest identified him as the prime suspect in the grisly Gilgo Beach murders.

One day after he was taken into custody near his Midtown office, he was hit with two counts each of first- and second-degree murder in connection with the strangulations of Melissa Barthelemy, 24, Amber Lynn Costello, 22, and Megan Waterman, 27.

He is also the prime suspect in the death of Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, who was the first of the so-called “Gilgo Four” to disappear.

For a couple years after high school, the Times said, Heuermann did part-time cleaning and maintenance at Jones Beach, which is just a few miles west of where the Gilgo victims were discovered wrapped in burlap in December 2010.

Baldwin, who worked as a lifeguard at nearby Tobay Beach, called it “very disturbing and ironic” that Heuermann is charged with “burying bodies in the dunes, just walking distance from my lifeguard stand.”

Heuermann eventually went to the New York Institute of Technology, and later became an architect with an office off Fifth Avenue.

In the 1990s, the married father moved into a ramshackle house on First Avenue in Massapequa Park, just a couple miles from Berner High, which is now the district middle school.

While Heuermann built a professional reputation for being a “big talker” and go-getter — even working on a project at Donald Trump’s prized Wall Street building — neighbors also remember him as isolated and vaguely sinister.

Etienne de Villiers, who lives next door to Heuermann’s address, claims he once had to tell him off for leering at his wife while she was sunbathing.

De Villiers told the Times that Heuermann’s 26-year-old daughter, Victoria, only just got her driver’s license shortly before her father’s arrest.

“I wanted to tell her, ‘Just get in your car and drive and never come back,’” he said.