NEW YORK – A robbery at gunpoint took place on May 4 in Central Park, just “500 feet” from Andrea Catsimatidis, the Manhattan Republican Party chair and daughter of billionaire John Catsimatidis, the New York Post reported.
She posted on Twitter: “I’m finally back in NYC and someone was just robbed at gunpoint 500 feet from me. What a nice welcome home!”
The victim was a 67-year-old woman who was “walking near Swan Lake, at Central Park South and Center Drive on the Upper West Side, when a man on a bike approached and said, ‘I need to take your purse,’ before flashing a black handgun, according to police,” the Post reported, adding that the victim asked “Can I at least keep my phone?”
“But the armed suspect allegedly refused and said, ‘No, I need your purse right now,’” the Post reported, noting that “she handed it over, and the suspect took off, cops said,” and “the cellphone was later found nearby on the ground.”
The robbery took place around 3:40 PM in broad daylight and Catsimatidis told the Post that “she got a Citizen app notification about the robbery, though she didn’t witness it firsthand.”
“Alerts keep popping up on my phone of violent crimes happening feet away from me and I keep thinking that I’m getting lucky, and it’s only a matter of time until it happens to me,” Catsimatidis said in a text message to The Post. “This never used to happen, this is not the NYC I grew up in.”
Cops said that “the suspect is around 5 feet 6, 150 pounds and in his 20s,” the Post reported, adding that “he is being eyed in another gunpoint robbery from last Friday inside the park by East 72nd Street and East Drive, police sources said.”