What was supposed to be an enjoyable father-son outing at a baseball game turned into a frightening criminal encounter on Monday.
According to Fox News, the 40-year-old father and his four-year-old son attended the New York Yankees game against the Baltimore Orioles on Monday night.
The game was played at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx borough of New York City, and the two left the stadium a little before 9 p.m. The father said his son initially enjoyed his first trip to the stadium.
“He was very impressed with Yankee Stadium. He’s never been there,” the father, who wished to remain anonymous, told the New York Daily News.
“He was very happy, and unfortunately, this thing happened and killed all the magic.”
Police released surveillance footage of the father and son walking into the lobby of their apartment building in the Bronx. The son was carrying a toy Yankees bat he apparently got at the game.
The father told the Daily News he saw the hooded suspect knocking on the lobby door after he and his son entered the building. He was not planning to let him in, but he changed his mind after the suspect started toying with the intercom.
“Now I think, ‘OK, maybe he lives here. I don’t want to be that neighbor,'” the father said.
He opened the door and let the suspect into the building before returning to his conversation with his son. The suspect proceeded to pull a handgun from his waistband and point it at the pair.
“That’s when I felt something at my back,” the father told Fox News. “He told me ‘Give me your money.’”
The father didn’t want to give up his money and cried out to a neighbor for help.
At that point, the father decided to surrender the $30 he had out of concern for his son’s safety.
“I was thinking of my son,” the victim said, the Daily News reported. “Nothing else. He was really scared.”
“He was confused mostly, I think. He didn’t know what was going on.”
The suspect fled after getting the money, and neither the victim nor his son were injured. Still, the incident had a lasting impact on the young boy.
“This morning when I took him downstairs he was pointing out the place that it happened. When I came back home and I bring him from school, he said, ‘It happened right there,'” the boy’s mother told the Daily News.
Crime has been skyrocketing across the country under President Joe Biden’s administration, especially in Democrat-run cities like New York. WABC-TV reported New York City crime in February 2022 was 59 percent higher than it was in February 2021.
Meanwhile, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg continues to be soft on the very type of crime this father and son were subjected to.
In January, Bragg reduced an armed robbery charge to shoplifting despite the fact that the subject wielded a pocket knife while stealing about $2,000 from a Duane Reade store, WNBC reported. The suspect, 43-year-old William Rolon, had been arrested 38 times previously.
All of this together has stolen Americans’ sense of safety from them.
“How things are in New York right now, we’d rather not go outside at night,” the father said, according to the Daily News. “Thankfully, we didn’t get hurt. Imagine if my son, not knowing anything, got hurt just for 30 bucks.”
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.