A lifelong New Yorker who had a chair hurled at him by a maniac outside a Hell’s Kitchen pizzeria said he’s now afraid to go out at night.
Vincent Buccino, 64, was sitting outside Amore Pizza Cafe on West 58th Street and Ninth Avenue and chatting on his phone after taking a nighttime walk around his neighborhood when a man yelled out “Bitch!” and randomly chucked the chair at his head.
Buccino, a retiree who suffers from high blood pressure and kidney disease, blocked his head and dropped his phone, giving his attacker the chance to run off with it. Buccino, meanwhile, ended up with a broken forearm.
“It’s going to change my life,” Buccino told The Post from the Manhattan rehab center where he is recovering. “I just have a fear now, going out at night. I’m never going to be on my phone again. It was like a real animal thing happened, really terrible.”
The Sept. 9 attack, caught on a video that was released by cops this week, occurred around 10:30 pm. Police described the suspect as a man with a dark complexion, last seen wearing a blue shirt and black and white checkered sneakers.
“He just appears out of nowhere,” Buccino said of his attacker. “I just look up and I see someone pick up a chair, and he just flung it. It was like the way he flung it, like a baseball. He was aiming for my head.”
Buccino was taken to Mount Sinai West where he had surgery on his arm. Despite the pain and the hours of physical therapy, he said he’s lucky the chair missed his head.
“If he would have hit my face, I would not survive that,” he said. “I could not have survived that with the damage to my arm.”
When he returns to his Hell’s Kitchen, Buccino will think twice before taking another walk.
“That’s my neighborhood so I’m not going to walk around the way I used to,” he said. “That’s all going to change.”
