By Nina Mandell
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Police have released a sketch of a man suspected of gunning down 71-year-old jewelry store worker and making off with two bags of jewels on Wednesday afternoon.
The suspect is described as a 5-foot-10, 160 pound light skinned black male. He was last seen wearing a blue wool coat, grey slacks, black dress shoes, a scarf, black gloves and sunglasses.
Henry Menahem was one of two workers in the store at the time of the midday robbery at 962 Madison Ave. He was pronounced dead Wednesday afternoon at Lenox Hill Hospital.
The killer entered the R. S. Durant store and hurled two canvas bags at the store employees — and told them to fill them up, the New York Times reported.
When Menahem and a 49-year-old colleague refused, authorities said the gunman then popped a magazine of bullets out of his 9mm semiautomatic pistol, held both objects in his hands and said: “You think I’m kidding? This is real,” Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, told the Times.
Then the gunman reloaded the weapon and fired a single shot.
Menahem was hit in the chest. The gunman turned to the other employee and told him to fill the bags. But the employee replied, “I want to call 911 for an ambulance first,” Browne told the Times.
Instead, the gunman knocked over a jewelry case, causing it to shatter, and stuffed diamond necklaces and other jewels into the bags before he fled.
The value of the jewelry taken was being determined, the Times said.
The brazen midday heist rattled shoppers and storekeepers along the strip of expensive fashion boutiques and art galleries where Menahem worked. R.S. Durant shares the block of Madison Avenue between E. 75th and E. 76th streets with shops run by designers Carolina Herrera and Nanette Lepore, and is a block away from the Whitney Museum of American Art.
“I’m a little concerned about security. I think all of us are,” Silas Shabelewska, manager at the Helly Nehmad gallery, told DNAinfo. "It’s a small community of shopkeepers. It happened at peak time. That’s really scary.”
Anyone with information on the suspect is asked to call the NYPD's Crime Stoppers Hotline at 800-577-TIPS.
