With Community By Their Side, Neighbors Overcome Trauma After Armed Robberies

A series of armed robberies last fall at Ox Cart Tavern, Mimi’s Hummus, Lark Café, and the Stratford Deli left our community feeling shaken and vulnerable. It also sparked an impassioned conversation about class, race, police, and the effects of gentrification in our community, much of which erupted during a heated town hall attended by hundreds of neighbors.

Now, about five months later, we checked in with police, community leaders, business owners, and the victims to find out how the investigations are going and what’s being done to prevent future incidents, as well as to see the lasting effect the string of robberies has had on our neighbors.

This report is the second in a week-long series. Today we look at the impact the crimes had on our neighbors. Yesterday we looked at the response to the crime. Tomorrow we’ll turn the conversation over to our readers for their thoughts and suggestions, before closing out the week with a list of tips to improve the neighborhood’s security.

When the sun is shining and it’s not so cold, those are the best days, the days when Dulce can distance herself from the robbery.

But the light and the warmth aren’t always easy to come by, and, on many an occasion, our neighbor has found herself anxiously hurrying from her job tending bar at Ox Cart Tavern, on Newkirk Avenue at Argyle Road, to her apartment where she lives with her husband and young children.

“I live about a three-minute walk from the restaurant, and I’ll get very nervous,” said Dulce, who was working the night Ox Cart was robbed this past November. “I always feel someone’s going to hurt me — it’s not a good feeling.”

It is a feeling that has persisted following the evening of November 5, when Dulce, as she has for the past year and a half, was working at Ox Cart’s bar. It had been a fun night filled with mixing cocktails and joking around with co-workers and neighbors as the restaurant filled with a large group of people from PS 217 celebrating a child’s 10th birthday.

About five minutes after the children left, the night dramatically changed.

[pullquote]“When I came home and saw my kids — I thought, ‘I could’ve never seen them again. When I left that day, that could’ve been the last time I saw them.’” –Dulce, a bartender at Ox Cart[/pullquote]

All of a sudden, Dulce saw her co-worker, who had just been confronted by a man with a gun, fly past her into the bathroom. Then she saw him.

“This guy had a gun under my arm and was saying, ‘Give me the money,’” she said. “I didn’t know what was happening; I was in shock. Then my boss, Jim [Mamary] yelled, ‘Give him the money from the register!’

“I remember at one of the tables there was a pregnant lady, and I kept thinking, ‘What’s going to happen to the pregnant lady?’” she continued.

As one of the armed men stood by the bar, Dulce said another one, who she remembers having “a huge gut,” walked around the restaurant with a large garbage bag, demanding cash from the individuals sitting there.

The three masked men made off with about $700 to $800 in a getaway car waiting for them outside the restaurant. The whole incident lasted just minutes.

It was hours later that the night’s events set in with Dulce, and began to take their toll.

“When I came home and saw my kids — I thought, ‘I could’ve never seen them again. When I left that day, that could’ve been the last time I saw them.’ For three days I didn’t want to go anywhere. I cried a lot.

“My son, now, will say, ‘Mommy, I don’t want those three men to come back and hurt you,’” Dulce said. “That breaks my heart. He’s a 6-year-old, and for him to have to say that.”

Unlike Dulce, it was the media coverage that weighed on neighbor Bushra Rehman.

Bushra, a writer, was teaching her “Two Truths and a Lie” workshop on November 13 at Lark Cafe, when one masked man walked in, flashed a gun, and stole the writers’ laptops.

Bushra and two of her students from that class recently published essays (you can read them here, here, and here) recounting the robbery and its impact. For them, they bristle not at their assailant.

“In some ways, I am grateful they did not find him,” writes Bushra in her essay. Instead, their ultimate victimization came from the media circus that followed it, which she said wrongfully cast them as pawns in a predictable narrative about gentrification, and the underlying issues they believe reporters willfully ignored.

[pullquote]“I do not agree with a position where the gunmen are seen simply as criminals.” –Bushra Rehman[/pullquote]

“I do not agree with a position where the gunmen are seen simply as criminals,” Bushra wrote to us. “In our articles about the event, we ask the question: Why would a young black man have to rob us to support himself? We must look at the reality of the ‘school to prison pipe-line’ in NYC, gentrification and displacement and its effects on young people.”

On the bright side, Bushra said that the robbery itself elicited a heightened sense of community from those who went through it.

“The members of the writing group were amazing in supporting each other, and we are still very close,” said Bushra.

Every victim of the crime we spoke with saw such silver linings, agreeing that it ultimately renewed their sense of — and commitment to — community.

“After something like this, you stop seeing human beings’ mistakes,” Dulce said. “If you go, you don’t want them to remember you always telling them their mistakes. You become more caring. I became more caring. You become a better human.”

The business owners were similarly buoyed by an outpouring of support.

“The robbery was incredibly unsettling, that someone could walk in and take whatever they wanted,” Lark Café owner Kari Browne wrote to us. “But we were so grateful and lucky that nobody was hurt. And the amount of community support that followed was so incredible and so humbling … We continue to feel loved and supported by neighbors and customers — and that provides us with a wonderful sense of security, in addition to the continued police presence and security cameras.”

David Pitula, of Ox Cart, also noted the neighborly boost that followed the robbery.

“We appreciated all the customers’ concerns and all the support they’ve shown us,” David said. “We’re moving on with our lives … We don’t live in fear.”

As for Dulce? Life isn’t always the easiest these days, but she prays summer’s sunshine and warmth will cast away the cold, aimless fear, and she can enjoy her strolls home after work once more.

“Next winter? I won’t even remember this,” she said.