BUS SAVIOR
Rapper stops grope of girl but gets cuffed, too
BROOKLYN ACTOR and hiphop artist Moise Morancy saved a 16-year-old girl from an alleged sexual assault while riding a bus in Queens on Tuesday.
Morancy posted a video recorded by another passenger to social media that shows the 21-year-old rapper restraining the alleged assailant before police arrived.
“Don’t you ever do that s--t again, you hear me?” Morancy, who has appeared in “Law & Order: SVU,” said in the video.
“He was touching a little girl, and then I defended her,” Morancy told cops in the video.
Police handcuffed both Morancy and the girl’s alleged assaulter, Pablo Levano, 36, before releasing Morancy from his handcuffs.
“I was really just defending that ... girl. He was touching her leg. He lunged at me and said he wanted to hurt me,” Morancy can be heard saying in the video, which went viral.
“I’m sitting at the back of the bus when this drunk guy gets on, saying all types of sexual s--t to this little girl sitting next to me,” Morancy wrote on his Facebook page.Morancy told the Daily News that Levano touched the girl’s hand and then began groping her leg. Morancy intervened, and said Levano threatened to kill him. Morancy said he gave the man “a couple combos to the face, knees to the nose and elbows to his neck” in self-defense.
Morancy said he held the man to the ground for 20 minutes while another passenger called 911.
Initially, cops treated Morancy like a suspect.
“I was confused. I felt criminalized,” said Morancy, adding that a black police sergeant called him a “hero” and ordered his release. “It gave me a different perspective on the NYPD, because I have had prior run-ins with the police because I have been racially profiled,” Morancy said.
Levano, charged with forcible touching, child endangerment and harassment, was held in Rikers on $2,000 bond or $1,000 cash bail.