They tried to rob the wrong man.
One of the victims of a spate of robberies in Central Park fought back when two teenagers, one of whom had a gun, tried to rob him on a promenade Friday night.
“You guys don’t have a ball to shoot me with,” he told them, recalling the horrifying incident to the Post.
“I became the perpetrator because I was like, ‘You just tried to steal my phone.'”
“Maybe I’m just crazy, but I thought, ‘Are you going to shoot me with a phone?’ You don’t have the balls to pull the trigger,” Ashikul Chaudhry said. .
Chaudhry, who is 6 feet 2 inches tall and weighs more than 200 pounds, had been walking most of the day and was on his way home to Harlem when the teens ran into the 25-year-old’s cellphone on a dark street. I tried to take the phone away.
“No thug in their right mind would have tried to attack me, but they can’t be over 16,” he said.
“I was just looking at the GPS on my phone, trying to figure out where this bike path was leading, and all of a sudden a hand came out and tried to grab my phone,” he recalled.
“I grabbed it, he missed, and then he came in front of me and just stared at me.”
That’s when one of the teens pulled a handgun from his pocket, police said.
“The first man took the phone out of my hand and put it in my face and said, ‘Give me the phone,'” Chaudhry said, adding that the teens were speaking Spanish.
He found himself thinking about his mother and friends.
“I thought about her,” he said.
“I thought about my friends, the people I interact with, my siblings, the kids I work with every day. And I thought about how lucky he didn’t pull the trigger, or that it was a fake gun. Thank you very much.”
Choudhury, who works as a preschool paraprofessional at an Upper East Side school, said her first reaction was to feel for the teens.
“My reaction as a teacher was kind of empathetic, ‘What are you doing? Are you going to risk all this for a phone call?'” he recalled.
Since his brother is a New York City police lieutenant in Brooklyn, he decided to call the police.
“I thought he would be disappointed if something happened to me and I didn’t do anything about it,” he said.
“I thought what happened to me could happen to anyone.”
He said he was disappointed by the increase in crime at the iconic park.
“It’s a real tragedy that crime is on the rise again. Central Park has been out of the headlines for a while, but now it’s getting worse and crime is on the rise again,” he said. Ta.
“I think I was lucky,” he said. “I think I was really lucky.”
