Moped robbery victim, 97, wants lowlife who snatched her necklace locked up to learn to be ‘courteous’
A 97-year-old Harlem woman who was robbed and knocked to the ground by a scooter-riding goon said she wants the “lowlife” caught and locked up, she told The Post on Tuesday.
“He should go to jail for 20 years,” Thelma Mason fumed. “Then he’ll learn how to be more courteous towards human beings. You just don’t do this to no one.
“I can’t stand nobody getting close to me now when I’m traveling, especially these motorbikes,” she added. “I’m always jumping. I don’t know if somebody’s going to attack me again.”
Mason was walking home from the store and was at West 127th Street and Eighth Avenue shortly before 5:30 p.m. on May 24 when she spotted the two-wheeled creep eying her.
“I was on the next block on my way home, minding my own business, and I saw this guy on a motorbike, or whatever you call it, at the bus stop,” the nonagenarian said.
“I looked at him and he looked at me. I’m just minding my own business and he cranked that thing up and came towards me and just snatched the necklace off my neck.
“I was walking slowly, as usual,” she said. “I didn’t have any idea he would attack me.”
The cowardly assault left Mason with a nasty scratch on her arm and a banged up her hip.
“You’ve got to be a lowlife to do something like that to an elderly woman,” eyewitness Carlos Santiago said Tuesday. “He was targeting her. He knew which way he was walking.
“He came right up to the bus stop, right on the sidewalk and he was waiting patiently, patiently,” said Santiago, 47. “Once he saw her he just took off on the scooter and ran up to her and just grabbed the chain and kept going. She fell and she was hurt.”
Meanwhile the thief – and the 18-karat gold necklace with a Gemini twins pendant, a gift from her daughter – remain unaccounted for, according to police.
Mason has lived in Harlem since 1951 and once worked cleaning office buildings.
“It’s a different world now,” she told The Post. “I used to party at night, come home [at] two or three in the morning, nobody ever bothered me. I wasn’t attacked or anything. Now you can’t even go out in the daytime before they’re taking things from you.”
