One by one, dozens of neighbors and New Yorkers from all corners of the city came to this corner of the East Village to express their sorrow for the unjustified attack on the owner of Ray’s Candy Store, a neighborhood icon inseparable from the man behind the counter, injured with a belt attached to a rock by this suspect who tried to sell him canned sodas early Tuesday morning.
“He went outside and they hit him. He is 90 years old, he is an old man. A young person like that to give him, that’s wrong”, says J Raúl Mojica, Ray’s client and friend.
Tirsa Scanlon, wanted to show her solidarity with the victim of the brutal aggression:
“I felt very bad because I used to live around here and I always came here for coffee or ice cream and as on Instagram they said: come say hello… Here I came, and I brought my son.”
With skull fractures and bruises but the attitude that has made this Iranian immigrant the object of affection, fascination and even a documentary, we find the nonagenarian where he has been working for almost five decades.
“I feel very good. There is no pain and I feel good, no problem”, says Ray Álvarez, owner of the candy store.
The hard-working small business owner known for running the business through night shifts, and witnessing the neighborhood transform from his window, says he has few words for his attacker, who has since been arrested.
“Nothing, because if they are full of drugs and alcohol, they don’t know and they don’t hear,” says the owner of the candy store.
But Álvarez does have requests for the authorities, which were echoed by all those who came to the candy store to wish him a speedy recovery.
“We need more police officers in the Subwayand in the street”, sentence.
Ray has to go back to the doctor in exactly seven days. He will have to wait for the wounds and fractures in his skull to heal before he can put his jaw back in the right place.
