Victim stood up to thugs who tried to rob him at gunpoint in Central Park: ‘You don’t have the balls to shoot me’
They tried to rob the wrong guy.
One of the victims in a spate of robberies in Central Park fought back when two teens — one armed with a gun — tried to mug him on a walking trail Friday night.
“You don’t have the balls to shoot me,” he told them, recalling the frightening incident to The Post.
“I became the aggressor because I was like ‘You just tried to steal my phone.’”
“I might just be crazy, but I was like, ‘You’re going to shoot me over a phone? You don’t have the balls to pull the trigger,’” said Ashikur Chowdhury.
Chowdhury, who’s 6’2” and weighs more than 200-pounds, had been out walking for much of the day and was headed home to Harlem when the teens tried to grab the 25-year-old’s phone on the darkened trail.
“Any reasonable thug wouldn’t dare attack me, but they couldn’t be older than 16,” he said.
“I was on my phone just looking at the GPS trying to figure out where this bike path was leading…and all of the sudden a hand reaches over and tries to grab my phone,” he recalled.
“I clutch it, he fails and then he gets out in front of me and is just staring at me.”
That’s when one of the teenagers pulled out a pistol from his pocket, he said.
“The initial guy takes it from his hand and points it up to my face and says ‘Give me the phone,'” Chowdhury said, adding that the teens were speaking Spanish.
He found himself thinking about his mom and friends.
“I thought about her,” he said.
“I thought about my friends, the people I interact with — my siblings, the kids that I work with every day…and I feel lucky and grateful that he didn’t pull the trigger or it was a fake gun.”
Chowdhury, who works as a kindergarten paraprofessional at an Upper East Side school, said his first reaction was to feel for the teens.
“As a teacher, my reaction is kind of to empathize, like, what are you doing? You’re going to risk all of this for a phone?” he recalled.
He decided to make a police report in part because his older brother is an NYPD lieutenant in Brooklyn.
“I just thought he’d be disappointed if something happened to me and I didn’t do something about it,” he said.
“I thought, if it happened to me, it could happen to anyone.”
He said he’s disappointed that crime is on an uptick in the iconic park.
“It’s really tragic that crime is back on the rise, because for a little bit there Central Park was staying out of the headlines, and now it’s getting back in there because it’s getting worse,” he said.
“I think I got lucky,” he said. “I really think I got lucky.”
