When I Was Mugged

I've lived in New York since 1984, save for three years when I lived upstate. In 19 years, I've only been mugged once.

Kew Gardens, Queens, April 1989. The month before I had been caught in a corporate downsizing, the first of my career, and was cheerfully enjoying some much needed leisure before I looked for a new job. Because I wasn't working, I was spending more daylight hours in my neighborhood than usual. Kew Gardens was then, and remains, a very desirable section of Queens. Surely there were then and perhaps are now a few isolated dicey pockets, but overall it's a very nice place to live.

I was coming into my apartment building's vestibule around 1:00 pm, having just thrust a load of laundry into one of the washing machines in a nearby laundromat. Fumbling with mail and purse I entered the elevator with a nicely dressed black man who was preoccupied with shuffling various business cards, as if on his way to an appointment in the building. This set off no warning bells for me at all - I didn't know most of my neighbors and it was entirely possible that one of them worked out of their home.

I was surprised out of my complacency when the elevator went up to the 3rd floor then abruptly down again rather than continuing to my apt on the 4th floor; surprised again to find the black man wielding a knife (not really long but in retrospect perhaps long enough) and harshly asking for my bag.

The crazy reaction, and a pure New Yorker's reaction, is that I argued with him. He asked for my watch - I retorted that my watch was worth nothing, as it was an antique men's watch (true). He wanted my ring - the ring had cost me $1.50 at the Seaport, and I told him so. He wanted my cash - I had $40 dollars, which I gave up willingly. Next he went after my wallet. I had irreplacable photographs of my father in that wallet, yet I eventually gave up my wallet and purse with their contents entire. As he pushed me out of the elevator into the building's basement I shouted that the credit cards I had wouldn't net him enough money to get out of Queens. Thankfully I still had my apartment keys and once I got in the elevator and in my apartment the first thing I did, before even calling the police, was cancel the credit cards - yet another seasoned New Yorker's reaction.

After the credit cards, the police.

I was connected to and picked up by detectives working the Senior Citizens' Crime Unit. Apparently this man or others in his circle had been targeting elderly women in my neighborhood in exactly the same way and at the same time of day I had been accosted.

The detectives were initiaally alarmed to learn that their perp had changed his MO so abruptly to target a younger woman like me, and then of course they were overjoyed; their previous victims had all been fuzzy about the specifics of the perp due to their impaired faculties - the dear detectives were beside themselves knowing they had a young person available to finally give them a clear descripton.

I spent a long while in the Forest Hills police station poring through mug books, then was firmly requested to take a drive with my new found friends into downtown Manhattan to One Police Plaza, where we traversed many corridors and elevators to end up at the desk of a police sketch artist.

For those of you that will never experience recreating a criminal's face with a seasoned NYPD sketch artist (and that will be practically all of you) you can thank all the gods now that I did so you will never have to. It's mentally excrutiating, physically exhausting, and time consuming. At the end the artist and I, as it is a hugely collaborative process, rendered an excellent facial representation of the mugger.

At one point during the three hours I spent with the sketch artist I thought of the fate of my poor laundry, forlorn and unattended in the laundromat.

The story concludes in the manner of most New York stories, with a small peep rather than a bang. The mugger was never caught, my boyfriend at the time was furious that I assisted the police and was adamantly opposed to my helping them any more than I had already done (he had decided they were "using" me).

My purse was never recovered. I still miss the watch. The ring was never replaced. I got a new wallet and new credit cards, but the photographs of my father have whooshed into limbo and are above all what I most regret losing.

For a few months after this incident I was diligent in my personal surveillance - I was haunted by what I might not have noticed and paranoid about the future. But that diligence too, faded, as it invariably does.

I've told this story to some people over the years and they all focus on the moment when the mugger brandishes a knife over his head and shouts demands to me about what he wants, and I calmly argue with him over the relative value of the objects he intends to steal from me. I agree - perhaps I would have been in great danger, but it was a judgement call and I think I made the right one.

He was frustrated by his victim debating each and every object's choice. But at the time it seemed to me perfectly reasonable - what mugger with any self-respect at all will take a coral ring worth $1.50? Puleez.