‘I want to kill him’
A feisty 82-year-old Manhattan man is ready for round two with the deranged deli mugger who swiped his cane.
“I want to kill him,” said victim Bernard Serlin, 82, in a Thursday interview with the Daily News. “He had no business doing that to me ... Really, I’m not a violent guy. But he deserves to die, this guy.”
Police caught up with the alleged mugger Thursday. Raoul Hyacinthe, 42, is charged with robbery, cops said.
Serlin, a Manhattan deli regular, took a punch to the face from Hyacinthe early Wednesday while getting his morning coffee, bagel and newspaper, said police
The attack didn’t keep him from returning to the Lower East Side bodega on Thursday for his regular order.
“He just pushed me,” recounted the tough-as-nails Serlin, who wore a cap adorned with a bald eagle and an American flag when he arrived Wednnesday around 6:30 a.m. “I never saw him before, and he never saw me. The bastard stole my cane ... I don’t bother nobody. This guy was nuts, he couldn’t be sane.”
Serlin, whose shocking mugging was captured on video, leaned on a cane loaned by a friend in the hallway of his apartment building as he recounted the wild scene.
As part of his routine, the elderly man typically hands out dollar bills to the homeless people gathered outside, according to a store employee.
Things turned ugly when Hyacinthe allegedly followed the smallish octogenarian into the deli.
“When I turned around, that’s when I saw him grabbing [the victim] by his neck,” deli worker Hector Ponce, 35, told The News. “I heard him say, ‘Oh, you don’t want to give me money? Well, if you don’t want to give me money, I’ll give you a punch.’ And he was standing there with his fist clenched in the air.”
Hyacinthe — identified by witnesses as a neighborhood regular who lives in a nearby men’s shelter — struck the senior in the head with a slow punch before shoving him to the ground and fleeing with the cane as two witnesses stood and watched inside the bodega at East Broadway near Clinton St., said witnesses and cops.
The attacker, clutching the cane, fled east on East Broadway and then south on Clinton St.
Serlin, a neighborhood resident for 40 years, declined medical attention for a minor head injury.
According to Ponce, the same panhandler “went crazy” two days earlier and attacked a parked car — punching at its side mirror.
“These men, they aren’t right in the head,” said Ponce. “They have problems. They are sick and don’t understand reason.”
Police also charged Hyacinthe with criminal mischief for striking a car mirror with the stolen cane after he walked out of the store after the robbery, and for a Sept. 4 incident where he’s accused of throwing a brick through a store window on Delancey St.
Hyacinthe has 24 prior arrests, most for misdemeanors including criminal mischief, menacing, fare-beating and drug possession, police sources said.
Local senior citizens expressed fears about going outside in the morning, when the homeless panhandlers roam the neighborhood streets.
“At one time I used to always give them money, but not anymore,” said Barbara Russo, 79. “You go past them and you’ve got to keep going ... My son went out the other morning and a drunk man came up to him and said, ‘What are you looking at?’ ”
Mo Colar, 81, said many of the homeless in the neighborhood are on drugs.
“I don’t even want to say anything because you never know what they might do,” said Colar. “Growing up here, you could go anywhere. Today? Forget about it.”
Serlin, unlike some of his neighbors, shrugged off the terrifying incident.
“Nothing scares me no more,” said Serlin. “You just gotta be careful, because there’s a lot of bad apples walking in the streets, a lot of craze-os. Look what they did to me. I don’t bother nobody.”