From Deranged Hippie Fugitive To Deranged Hippie Reject

When you’re on the lam, everything is exciting at first. Everyone thinks of you as a badass. You can taunt your victims. Then you get unceremoniously taken into custody after exiting the el train in West Philly — where’s the shootout in that!? — and all of the sudden you’re just some “deranged hippie reject”:

A deranged hippie reject, accused of gunning down a Staten Island commune leader, was nabbed yesterday at a Philadelphia train station after more than a year on the lam, officials said.

Rebekah Johnson, 44, jumped from behind a row of bushes and waylaid Ganas leader Jeff Gross outside the commune’s Staten Island compound along a sloping section of Corson Avenue, shooting him six times with a .38-caliber pistol on Memorial Day 2006, police said.

Witnesses said Johnson quickly walked away down a hill, virtually disappearing for 13 months until a fugitive task force caught up with the hateful hippie has-been in the City of Brotherly Love.

Authorities said they tracked her there after she got sloppy and bought a car in Delaware using her real name, and opened a post office box in nearby Cherry Hill, N.J.

Johnson was placed under arrest at 11 a.m. after she stepped off a train from Camden, N.J., to Philadelphia in the city’s western section, where a dozen law-enforcement officers were waiting for her.

“We had prior intelligence that she was going to be there,” said Robert Kurtz, acting supervisor of the Marshals Service’s fugitive task force. “She didn’t try to escape.”

Kurtz said the suspect was not armed when she was caught.