Threat from sicko stalker on street
A PACE UNIVERSITY student bit the bullet Friday and admitted that wearing an ammo-studded belt to his classes was a foolish faux pas.
Saad Al Saud, a 19-year-old freshman from Saudi Arabia who goes by “Rex,” said he had no idea his belt was going to cause chaos.
“This got blown out of proportion,” Al Saud told the Daily News. “Everyone was safe. It was just an inconvenience. I don’t think anyone should be held accountable.”
Al Saud, who shares a last name with Saudi royals, declined to talk about his family beyond saying they were wealthy and involved in real estate.
The computer science student said he wears his bullet-belt every day. Before this week, it never caused a problem.
“Luckily, in this case it wasn’t an attack and no one got hurt,” he said.
But Al Saud’s terrified fellow Pace students felt differently on Thursday.
Thanks to his crime of fashion, they feared an active shooter with an assault weapon was about to storm through the building. A couple of students spotted it about 2:30 p.m. when he dropped his pants in a school bathroom stall and his machinegun bullet belt hit the floor.
“I was in the bathroom and I have to take my belt off obviously,” Al Saud said.
One student snapped a picture of the large-caliber rounds and posted it on social media with the caption, “WTF.”
The sudden rush of attention freaked out Al Saud as he sat in the bathroom stall, he said.
“I saw one dude come in and snap me,” he recalled. “I was like, ‘Why are people Snapchatting me while I’m taking a s---?’ ”
He found out when he exited the bathroom and saw a huddled group of people staring at him.
“My classmate told me there was a shooter at 41 Park Row. I was like, ‘That’s not true,’ ” he said.
“I just went to the cops and I said you’re probably looking for me.”
Alerted by scared students, an NYPD counterterrorism team rushed to Pace University in lower Manhattan and evacuated the building.
But they calmed things down quickly when Al Saud stepped forward and showed them his machine-gun cartridges were purely decorative.
“I feel bad because . . . I heard people crying so I was like, ‘F---,’ because that’s indirectly my fault. My friends thought it was cool,” laughed the 6-foot-8 freshman, who sports a bleached blond mohawk and has a taste for punk music.
He later found out that the person who first saw his belt under A SINISTER stalker terrified a woman with an armful of unwanted gifts that left her fearing for her life, police sources said Friday.
The creep approached the woman in Hell’s Kitchen with a rose, photos of her and a letter with a chilling threat.
“Your going to get yours. I hope you are close to God because you are going to meet him soon,” read the letter, which was handed off to the woman on W. 56th St. near 10th Ave. around 7 p.m. Thursday, according to sources.
The unidentified man approached the 33-year-old woman and handed her the rose and a white envelope, sources said.
Inside the envelope was the letter, which, along with the threat, detailed her schedule for the past week and the pictures, the sources said. The man took off after he handed over the odd offering.