A Queens woman who cops say was robbed by a teenager later arrested for punching a grandmother down church stairs says she is relieved he is off the streets.
“I was hoping and praying that he’d be caught, and I was hoping and praying no one would get hurt,” said the woman, who was mugged three days before Irene Tahliambouris, 68, was attacked on the steps of a Briarwood church in Queens.
Tahliambouris was hospitalized with a fractured skull following the April 7 assault.
“This poor lady probably wouldn’t have been attacked if he were caught,” the previous victim told the Daily News.
The woman, 50, said she was stalked by the 16-year-old suspect who followed her to a bank in the Rochdale Village Shopping Center, just steps away from the 113th NYPD precinct. She was on her way home from work on April 4, she said.
The teen tailed her from the bank into her building on 127th Ave. near Bedell St. and onto the elevator.
“I didn’t think anything of it. We have cameras in the elevator, outside and inside the building, I’m not feeling unsafe,” she said.
But suddenly he cornered her and pushed close to her, acting as though he was carrying a knife.
“He was gesturing that he had something in his pocket,” she said, and demanded money, her car key and her phone.
When she told him she didn’t take any cash out of the bank, he got impatient.
“Now he’s counting down. He said: ‘You’re moving too slow, 3…2…1,” she recalled.
She gave him her car key and when the elevators doors opened on an upper floor, she pushed past him to alert her neighbors, she said.
“I started screaming hysterically,” the victim said. He seemed panicked and fled down a stairwell.
A neighbor emerged from a nearby apartment and walked with the shaken woman to help her report the crime.
When she got to the police precinct, close to where she had parked the car, it was already gone, and she knew the suspect had his eye on her from the time she pulled in.
“That’s when I realized he was following me for about 20 minutes,” she said.
The teen, whose name was not publicly disclosed because of his age, was taken into custody late Thursday and charged with robbery, assault, grand larceny and criminal possession of stolen property in connection with the attack on Tahliambouris.
While in custody at a Queens police precinct, he tried to take his own life by wrapping his shirt around his neck but an officer intervened, a source said.
If convicted, he faces up to 25 years in prison, said the Queens District Attorney’s office.
