Angel beaten by gang of looters

It was the showdown on Broadway — five Guardian Angels versus dozens of looters wielding hammers, chunks of wood, bats and crowbars in a pitched battle over a sneaker store.

Angel member Aram Sabet — who joined the group nine weeks ago — sustained 48 stitches, cuts, a broken nose, a chipped front tooth and two loose molars. He can’t see out of his left eye, which is full of blood, he told the Daily News Wednesday.

“My entire body feels like it was hit by a truck,” Sabet said as he rested at the Midtown apartment where he has lived for 28 years. “If I get up to walk, I have to hold on to things.”

Sabet, 47, described his injuries as he recounted how he, three other Angels and group founder Curtis Sliwa fended off repeated efforts from looters to clean out a Foot Locker store in the East Village on Tuesday night.

When he emerged from a Canal St. subway station on Tuesday night, Sabet saw a man with a black knapsack handing out Citi Bike key fobs. “‘Get bikes before 7 and go do damage,’ he was saying,” Sabet recalled. “That told me there are definitely people instigating things. It’s not the protesters.”

Sabet next saw a pickup truck with New Jersey plates with bricks covered by a tarp in the flatbed. “I was like, ‘This is going to get dangerous,’ ” he recounted.

Police suspect looters were well organized. Police Commissioner Dermot Shea posted on social media Wednesday a picture of plastic boxes filled with bricks stacked on a streetcorner, and said they were “strategically placed.”

Then about 8 p.m., Sabet and a handful of other Angels, including Sliwa, made their way to Broadway near Washington Place in the East Village and found mayhem.

“It was a total zoo outside the Foot Locker,” he said. “The front group was clearly the instigators. They had bats, hammers, two-by-fours. In the middle was nonviolent protesters, and the end was spectators taking videos and pictures.”

The Foot Locker had already been partially looted. Sliwa, Sabet and other Angels removed the remaining looters and stood guard waiting for police.

Sabet said a group of about 60 people arrived, and started shouting, “You’re not getting paid enough, I want my sneakers, F—- you!”

“We were able to fend them off from relooting the store,” he said. “There was a group of three to four guys with hammers breaking windows. Peaceful protesters got involved in trying to stop them.”

At 9:56 p.m., Sabet called 911. “I said, ‘I see crowbars and bats and two-by-fours and sticks.’ They surrounded us. People were fighting with us and protesters were fighting with them,” he said.

Someone fired a flare gun at the Angels. It slammed into the door of the Foot Locker. Sabet said he picked up the projectile from the gun and tried to use it to ward people away.

“I turned away and got clocked in the face by a two-by-four. I didn’t go down, but my body tensed and I fell against a wall,” he said. “Both my eyes went black, my nose was gushing, They went to town on us.”