Storeowners Act in Self-Defense, but Scars Remain
By KAREEM FAHIM
New York Times, August 21, 2009
An electronics store owner who shot and killed two robbers in a gunfight
regretted none of it but his scars. A pet store owner who did the same and
briefly became a neighborhood hero, closed his shop, moved on to other work and
tried to forget.
A jeweler spent the rest of his life wishing he had never chased after two men
who robbed his Brooklyn store. He told his family that he meant only to wound
them when he pulled the trigger. Insurance, he lamented, would have covered the ]
theft.
For as long as there have been stickup men, there have been shopkeepers who
fought back. Shooting the robbers was in some ways the simplest part, requiring
only the reflexes of a survivor, and a gun — though more than a few store owners
have been prosecuted for using unlicensed guns.
The real pain came in the weeks and years that followed. The proprietors replayed
the violence that had marched into their cramped bodegas, restaurants or jewelry
stores, cursing the career criminals or desperate men who had threatened their
livelihoods — their lives, even — and their sanity.
The deep regret such violence creates was hinted at last week when the owner of a
restaurant supply store in Harlem killed two robbers with a pump-action shotgun.
The owner, Charles Augusto Jr., expressed sympathy for the families of the dead
men, and said he wished they had just left his store.
His emotions echoed those of Peter Giron, the co-owner of a South Bronx dry
cleaning establishment who shot and killed a 17-year-old gunman in 1978. Mr.
Giron collapsed and had to be sedated after the 17-year-old’s father visited his
store and politely asked about the shooting.
A few owners said the shootings in their pasts, even those from decades ago, were
still too painful to talk about. One, who would speak only anonymously,
said, “I’ve been trying to forget about this since it happened.”
Ivan Blume, who wrestled a gun away from a robber and killed both him and his
accomplice at his store, Quality Canines, in Brooklyn, in 2003, would say
only, “It’s a chapter in my life I’d rather close.”
But for Youssouf Drame, who shot and killed two of the four men who tried to rob
his Crown Heights electronics store last November, the pain is mostly physical:
In the gunfight that broke out after he grabbed one of the robbers’ weapons, Mr.
Drame was shot seven times. His left hand is permanently damaged, and scars
remain where his body was pockmarked with bullet holes. But if he had it to do
again, Mr. Drame said, “I’d do worse.”
His is the other face of the shopkeeper’s rage, the one that draws cheers from
crime-weary citizens and business owners. At his store last week, Mr. Drame
watched on the dozens of televisions on display as Mr. Augusto spoke about the
Harlem shooting. “How are you going to rob an old man like that?” Mr. Drame said
in disgust.
He opened his store nine years ago, after stints working as a fishmonger, a
parking attendant and a cleaner of vendors’ carts.
“I worked so hard, and they wanted to take what is mine,” Mr. Drame, 35, said of
the men who tried to hold him up.
The robbery occurred on a Monday night. The men wore masks.
“Africa,” one of the men said to Mr. Drame, who is from Senegal, using his
nickname. “Don’t do nothing stupid.”
Mr. Drame, who has five children, grabbed the man’s gun and started firing. When
it was over, one of the robbers was dead, and another died in the hospital a
short time later. The other two men fled, though one was later arrested.
Mr. Drame spent a few weeks in Kings County Hospital Center, then came back to
work, installing security cameras that cover every approach to his store. If
anything, the shooting gave him new strength, he said: “I didn’t come to America
to die.”
Many of the stores where owners made stands over the years have vanished. Gone is
the delicatessen on Ninth Avenue in Manhattan where, in 1930, Adolph Sargenti
fired two bullets into the temple of a robber in a shabby suit who rifled through
the cash register. So is La Cabana, the restaurant in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where
Rafael Disla fatally shot robbers in two separate episodes in 1991.
Mr. Disla, who was shot during one of the robbery attempts, now lives in a
basement apartment in Cypress Hills and walks with a limp, his landlord said,
adding that Mr. Disla was on vacation in the Dominican Republic.
Leonard Rosenthal owned the Gold Star Jewelry Store in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn,
for almost 20 years until he died of cancer in 2006, said his wife, Marina
Rosenthal, who spoke at her daughter’s New Jersey home this week about the
aftermath of the robbery that took place at the store 15 years ago.
Mr. Rosenthal’s loyal customers called him Lenny. He was originally from Ukraine
and lived in Monmouth County in New Jersey. He owned a gun, which he used on the
afternoon of June 24, 1994, after he buzzed a man who asked to look at a ring
into the store.
The man was armed, and Mr. Rosenthal watched him leave the store with a bagful of
jewelry. But then, in a decision that troubled Mr. Rosenthal for the rest of his
life, he followed the robber as he left.
He shot the robber in the back and side, the police said at the time, and an
accomplice, who was outside, was hit in the chest. The robber was killed. “He
meant to injure the first guy,” said his 20-year-old son, Mark Rosenthal, who sat
with his mother this week. The police told Mr. Rosenthal that he had killed
dangerous, wanted men, but it hardly made him feel better.
In shock, he kept the store closed for a few weeks. “But we had to pay the
mortgage,” Ms. Rosenthal said, so the store reopened. Mr. Rosenthal, 42 at the
time, went gray prematurely and found it hard to talk to his family about the
robbery. His store was robbed again a few years later, and he did not use his
gun, his wife said.
It was only just before his death 12 years later that Mr. Rosenthal spoke to his
son about the shooting, as the two of them drove to the store. “He said he
regretted it,” Mark Rosenthal said. “He said he wished he never left the store.”
Youssouf Drame, at his store in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where he shot and killed two men who tried
to rob him in November 2008. Mr. Drame showed his stomach, where surgeons removed bullets
that lodged in his body during the gunfight.
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