Last week, a man attacked a 96-year-old man in a Queens apartment building in order to steal the senior citizen's money. Now the victim is speaking out: Alfonso Scannapieco told the Daily News, "If I run into him, he's got to fight me. I'm still going to lose, but he's got to fight me."
Scannapieco had entered his Woodside building where a man said to him, "Funeral." Thinking that the man was asking for donations for a funeral, Scannapieco took the elevator with the man and later offered him $5. The Post reports that Scannapieco had taken the money off a roll of bills that was much more tempting—the man pushed the elderly man to the floor and ran off with another $90. A surveillance camera caught images of the suspect.
Scannapieco's 66-year-old son told the News, "You've got to really be a lowlife to prey on someone with a cane," while the victim, a life-long New Yorker, said it was his first mugging, "It's something that never happened to me before in all my life."
In 2007, elderly women, including a 100-year-old, were mugged in their Queens buildings; their attacker was sentenced to 75 years in prison.
