Fiendish $5 rob

Lowlife bashes wheelchair woman in S.I. ripoff

A NEIGHBORHOOD menace knocked down a disabled woman waiting for an ice cream truck outside her Staten Island apartment — all to steal the $5 she had stashed in her wheelchair, the victim said Tuesday.

Debbie Pierro, 58, who lost her right leg to an infection earlier this year, was looking forward to a cool treat — a vanilla-chocolate twist in a cone — at around 10 p.m. Monday.

She and her sister, Theresa Silvestri, were waiting outside her apartment building on Heberton Ave. at Vreeland St. in Port Richmond on the unseasonably warm night when Silvestri ran inside for a few moments.

That’s when Marquise Hyman, 22, who’s a familiar face in the neighborhood, struck, Pierro and police said.

He barreled into her wheelchair, slamming her to the ground, and then took the $5 she kept in her cupholder.

“I have a bump on my head. My elbow’s all black and blue. He broke my wheelchair, too,” Pierro said, jiggling one of the chair’s loosened armrests to show the damage.

On Tuesday, Pierro (photo) still had a large, raised welt on her right leg, which is amputated above the knee. Her injuries weren’t serious enough to go to the hospital, she said.

Silvestri said she ran back outside after hearing Pierro call for help.

“She calls me, ‘I’m on the ground,’ ” Silvestri said. “I picked her up and said, ‘Debbie, what happened?’

“She said, ‘Oh, I got knocked on the floor by the kid, who always goes like this,’ ” Silvestri recounted, waving her hands near her face to mimic the suspect.

On Tuesday, Pierro, Silvestri, and their friends sat in the front courtyard of their building, the Parkside Senior Apartments, feeding the squirrels and venting their anger over the suspect, who they know by his face and first name.

Pierro, who has two adult daughters, used to work in the building as a home health aide, and moved into her own apartment in January, she said.

The sisters and their friends said the thief walks around the neighborhood acting erratically and begging for cash.

“I knew him for years,” said Martha Hinton, 68, adding that she gave him $2 when she saw him on the street just a day earlier.

“I can’t believe he did that to you. We were good to him. We gave him dollar bills and stuff,” Hinton said. “I’m very aggravated.”

Police caught up with Hyman, who lives around the corner on Vreeland St., and arrested him on a robbery charge.

Pierro never got her ice cream, she said. But she did get some satisfactionaftercallingpolice.

Hyman had returned to the scene and confronted her just after 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, she said.

“He was walking by, and he stopped, and he was cursing at me and everything,” Pierro said. “He said, ‘You called the cops on me for $5?’ ”

She snapped back, “Yes, I did.” Soon afterward, cops cuffed him.