NEW YORK—Three men attempted to rob a woman as she walked out of her home to her car in the wealthy Queens neighborhood of Jamaica Estates on Sunday night at around 7 p.m. The thieves bashed the woman on the head with a gun and threw her in the car. They told her they’d kill her if she moved, and then ran inside her house on Somerset Road.
What they didn’t know was that women’s son-in-law Mark, and daughter were in the bedroom upstairs. His wife was packing her bag for a business trip and was about to go down stairs and show her mom her new shoes. When she opened the door, she saw the men, one with a gun, coming in the front door.
“She ran back in the room and screamed ‘Oh my god, they’re in the house!’ One of the guys came charging up the stairs. I opened the door to a gun in my face,” said Mark Vejack, who just married into the family last year and was staying in the house with his young wife until their new apartment deal goes through. “I slammed the door and yelled at my wife to grab my gun. I don’t even own a gun.”
His quick thinking worked, because the intruders then bolted for the door.
“I grabbed the mirror off the wall, just so I could go out there with something, and opened the door and ran after them. I found a baseball bat in the hall. It was one my wife had used for a prop in a cablevision shoot, and I chased them across the lawn. One guy shot back at me. They got away in a black Maxima, or Altima. I got the first six of the seven digits of the license plate.”
The police say that is was a stolen car, but haven’t tracked it down. They also found the bullet casing on the lawn, which they will fingerprint. If the men have been arrested before, the police will have them on file, so far none of the three young men has been identified.
Mark says the police showed up within a minute of his wife calling them, and most likely passed them as they drove to the scene.
His mother-in-law sustained only a big lump on her head, and no one else was hurt. It doesn’t appear that the thieves managed to steal anything.
“I’m actually surprised at how well she’s taking this. Despite how bad the selling market is right now, I assumed she’d be moving out of there ASAP. But she said ‘I’m not going to be scared out of my home,” continued Mark, who appeared to have recovered from the initial shock of the home invasion.
His in-laws have lived in their home for almost 50 years, and say it is highly unusual for something like this to happen. It’s normally a very safe neighborhood with private security that patrols the streets.
“To open your door and have someone standing there with a gun facing your head, it’s just a terrifying feeling,” said Mark.
Mark, who is a mortgage broker, says he has since investigated how to obtain a gun legally, and has come to the following conclusion. “The funny thing about New York is the only people with guns are bad people.”
Vejack claims that the effort you have to go through, and the money you have to spend (around $500) in addition to getting finger printed, pass an approval process and the slim chance of actually getting a license, would discourage a lot of people from getting a gun legally. “It’s almost impossible to get a gun legally in your house, it’s hard, and yet the streets are swamped with guns.”
