Admin
A tough-working Brooklyn deli proprietor who was bashed with a steel pipe by a gang of thugs throughout a caught-on-video hate crime is again on the job — however nonetheless fears the brutes will return for him, his spouse informed The Post Wednesday.
Marie Shahzada, 45, mentioned the attack on her hubby Jamal Sawaid at his Coney Island store final week has put a dent in enterprise — and even native pols are too scared to return to the realm to assist small companies.
“Small companies are susceptible to all of the violence,” she mentioned. “In this group, in Coney Island, what we’ve been asking is for the native representatives to return out. The native representatives usually are not strolling from Mermaid Avenue, West sixteenth all the way in which right down to thirty fifth.
“They’re scared themselves,” she added. “If they’ll’t do this, then what do you concentrate on us?”
Sawaid, 58, was inside his store round 2:20 p.m. Saturday when 4 males got here in and confronted him, calling him a “sand n—-er” and hitting him within the face and head earlier than beating him with a steel pipe, in response to police.
While he nonetheless feared for his life, the store proprietor, an immigrant from Yemen who has been a part of the group for greater than 20 years, returned to work the day after the hateful assault.
“Yeah, after all, he’s afraid, however who’s gonna feed our household?” requested Shahzada.
“He’s a workaholic, to be very sincere,” she mentioned. “The minute he knew he may come again, which was the following day – which he shouldn’t be again – he got here. I got here with him. We tried to wash up as a lot blood as we are able to.
“And precisely what he’s saying [is], ‘Who’s gonna maintain the household?’ You have to return again, it’s a must to open up.”
Surveillance video contained in the 1716 Mermaid Avenue Deli and Grill exhibits one of many assailants are available and say one thing to Sawaid, then unexpectedly assault the shopkeeper with a steel rod because the suspect’s cohort got here in and assailed one other employee.
“My husband was cleansing up behind and a gentleman walked in and requested him, ‘Where’s the sand n—r?’ My husband thought it was a joke, so he regarded up, smiled, and mentioned, ‘Here I’m,’” Shahzada mentioned.
“Because he was the one Arabic particular person within the retailer on the time, and he thought it was a joke, and the man began swinging with the steel rod,” she mentioned.
“My husband, they ripped open his head. He ended up getting eight staples, stitches. His face was swollen. Blood was all around the ground.”
Sawaid was taken to NYU Langone Hospital, the place he was handled and later launched.
“Now, the swelling goes down barely, but it surely’s now turning black and blue,” his spouse mentioned. “He has to drink out of a straw. Like coffee proper now, he’s ingesting out of the straw.”
The NYPD launched images of the 4 creeps fleeing the scene, however all of them stay on the lam.
The division’s Hate Crimes Task Force is investigating the incident.
“He’s a person and he’s not going to wish to say that, however he’s afraid,” Shahzada mentioned of her husband.
“But my husband’s very supportive in the truth that he is aware of, you realize, he has to feed a household, he has to run a enterprise,” she mentioned. “His prospects, the group, they’re his prolonged household. So it’s like, you realize, he feels a clumsy obligation to open his doorways for them as nicely.
“He has such an enormous coronary heart for them.”
