A crew of pizza-loving punks attacked a Domino’s deliveryman in the Bronx, and were caught on camera smiling from ear to ear as they rode off with the victim’s bike and two large warming bags filled with pies, police said Friday.
Leonardo Rodriguez was working for an E. 167th St. Domino’s and was rolling past E. 172nd St. and Plimpton Ave. in Mount Eden about 7:30 p.m. on May 1 when three men pounced.
“Out of nowhere I saw these guys and a knife and I felt somebody punch me in the face,” Rodriguez, 31, told The Daily News.
The punch split Rodriguez’s lip and sent him to his knees, which still hurt two weeks later.
“The kept punching and punching and took the pizza and the bicycle,” he remembered. “I was scared. I went to the precinct and the police went on a tour with me to check the area to see if they find anything.”
Surveillance video released by cops on Saturday shows the grinning thieves walking down E. 172nd St. with the pizza bags and stolen bike, which cost Rodriguez about $200.
Rodriguez’s co-workers at Domino’s have allowed him to work inside the store until he can save up enough money to buy a new bike, but the Bronx resident doesn’t know if he’ll be delivering pizzas anytime soon.
“I’ve been nervous about going out since this happened,” he said. “I’m scared to go out and start delivering again.”
“I feel outraged about it,” he said. “Why would they just steal a bike and pizza from me? It’s crazy out there.”
No arrests have been made.
The piping-hot heist is hauntingly similar to a series of deliverymen robberies that have plagued Upper Manhattan in recent months, including one involving Domino’s deliveryman Edwin Cabrera, who escaped a May 3 knife attack with a few scrapes, but but he is emotionally scarred by the ordeal.
“I didn’t get physically hurt but I’m left with psychological trauma because you remember something like this for the rest of your life,” Cabrera, 36, told the Daily News last week.
Cops have yet to link the Bronx robbery to the ones in Manhattan.
