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SoHo Woman Who Challenged Armed Men Wouldn't Recommend Others Do the Same

By Trevor Kapp | July 11, 2013 8:55pm
 SoHo resident Anna Graham recounts thwarting robbers who held a gun to her head outside her apartment July 3.
Anna Graham
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SOHO — She stared death in the eyes and laughed in its face — but wouldn’t recommend it to others.

The brave SoHo woman who told a pair of armed men last week that they didn’t have the “balls” to shoot her said on Thursday she wouldn’t encourage others to follow her lead.

“If anybody would ask me what should we do in your place, I would say, ‘If you have a bag, give it up. And pray. Because it’s not worth a human life,’” audacious Anna Graham, 54, said outside her Grand Street home.

Wearing her pajamas, Graham stepped outside her studio for a cigarette on July 3 around 1 a.m. when she was approached by two men who demanded her wallet. When she told them she didn’t have any money, one of the assailants put a firearm to her head.

“He said, ‘I’ll shoot you, b---h,’ Graham recalled. “And I went, ‘Shoot!’ That’s the first thing that came out of my mouth. I was in shock. I had no idea exactly what was happening.”

Graham said the gunman then pointed the piece at her midsection.

“I understood I had to keep the eye sight. I was looking him straight in his eyes,” she said. “The other guy who was right next to him, I only saw him with my peripheral vision, and he was going, ‘Shoot, shoot, shoot.’”

But instead of giving them money, she gave them lip.

“I said, ‘To shoot someone, you need to have balls. It doesn’t look like you have any,’” she recalled.

A friend of Graham’s then came outside of the building and was pushed to the sidewalk by one of the toughs. The crooks grabbed a bag and took off down the block, eventually turning onto Greene Street and getting away, Graham said.

She added that despite her gutsiness during the harrowing ordeal, she spent the following five days in bed and is still shaken up.

“Yeah, I know, I’m amazing,” she joked. “But it doesn’t make me feel much better. I’m a wreck.”

Graham had another suggestion for would-be-mugging victims, in addition to forking over your wallet.

“Run like hell if you can,” she said.