$4,000 gone in flash
Thief takes jar of cash from counter in Bronx bodega
A quick-fingered thief swiped a glass jar containing at least $4,000 from a Bronx bodega counter — costing the store’s owner two years of cash savings.
Belinda Agyare, the owner of the B&B African Market on Boston Road near E. 167th St. in Morrisania, said she stashed between $20 to $50 away each day in a jar on the counter of her store, rolling the bills into tight tubes as she pushed them into the jar with a nail file.
Agyare hoped to give the money to her two daughters — but on May 8, a thief had other plans.
At about 11 a.m., when the cashier stepped away to shelve an item a thief — who’d been lurking around the store for about 10 minutes — grabbed the jar and fled, Agyare said.
The suspect took off, but his picture was captured on a security camera. Cops released the picture Monday in an effort to catch him.
“If I can at least get back some of my money or at least see him one time to at least say something to him, maybe that will help me,” said Agyare, 46, who came to the U.S. from Ghana in 1996
“I would just tell him, ‘Look at me. You know, I came all the way from Africa to just … get something to support my kids and me. And then I used my two years to save that money.’”
She saved money the same way when she ran a hairbraiding business, piling up $6,000 or $7,000 in about four years.
The jar left a ring on the bodega’s counter. “Any time I come in here and see this mark, it always reminds me,” Agyare said.
She cried the next day when her daughter showed her surveillance footage of the theft.
She said she sacked the cashier, who she said ignored her explicit instructions to never leave the counter unattended. “Maybe she think she know much more than me,” Agyare said of the cashier.
The cashier, Cynthia Adeapena, 34, acknowledged she walked away for a second, but told the Daily News she quit the job on her own.
“It is impossible not to leave the counter because if somebody wants to buy something and can’t find it, I have to help,” she said. “I was also not fired. I left because I felt it was not safe to be there all by myself.”
Agyare’s daughter, Melody Adu, 19, runs the place when mom’s not around, and she typically locks the store whenever she has to leave the counter.
“I feel like he has to pay for what he did,” said Adu, who just finished her first year at Howard University on a partial scholarship. “She really wanted to open up the tin jar after I came home from school to split it between me and my little sister.”
After the theft, Agyare installed a sliding Plexiglas door at the counter, and said she’s not going to keep her savings jar on the counter anymore.