Video shows NYC Foodtown worker attacked by shoplifters

Disturbing new video shows a Foodtown worker in the Bronx getting pummeled this week fighting the uphill battle of trying to stop shoplifters.

The 36-year-old employee was attacked around 1 p.m. Tuesday inside the supermarket on Allerton Avenue near Paulding Avenue in Allerton during a “verbal dispute with a customer’’ who was stealing — only the latest in an avalanche of retail thefts in the Big Apple, cops said.

Store manager Louis Porcelli told News 12 that shoplifting has become more of a problem at the store over the past year — as it has in the rest of the city — and he called for an increased police presence.

He said he’d never seen an incident in his store as violent as the one this week.

“Not to this extent,” Porcelli said. “I mean, we had caught people, we ran after them, we got the merchandise, but you know, not this brutal attack.

“I hope people think twice before they do [something like this],” he added. “If you’re hungry, ask for it, and maybe we’ll give you a steak or whatever. But don’t go and steal.”

The footage, obtained by News 12, shows one person knocking the employee to the floor near the exit of the supermarket and then viciously punching him while he was down.

The victim was socked in the face and forehead, authorities said.

The assailant left the store with another person, who was standing in the doorway, the clip shows.

Porcelli said the skirmish began when the worker confronted a man and woman about leaving with unpaid food stashed in their bag.

The duo exchanged words with the employee, who tried to stop them as they made their way to the door.

The worker, who refused medical attention, was back to work at the supermarket Thursday but was too upset to speak about what had happened.

Retail workers and business owners have told The Post that the recent skyrocketing number of shoplifting incidents, which was a record-breaking 63,000 last year, has become unbearable.

A Midtown retail group even went as far as hiring a K-9 unit to deter the stick-fingered shoppers.

Mayor Eric Adams also took the drastic step earlier this month of telling shop owners to prohibit customers from entering their stores with masks on — so that surveillance cameras can catch those with crime on their mind. 

The attack at Porcelli’s store came just about a week after a defenseless Bronx grocery store cashier was repeatedly pummeled by a deranged woman and her grown daughters in a shocking caught-on-video assault.

Lisbel Rodriguez Luna, 25, was left bruised and battered — and scared for her life — in the Feb. 26 afternoon attack at Food Universe in Fordham Manor that stemmed from an argument over cashing in recyclable bottles a week earlier.

“No one ever attacked me like that,” Luna told The Post a day later, adding she’s terrified to go back to work because her attackers are still on the loose and may return.
But “I have to come back,” she said. “I have to work. I need money. I need my job. I don’t know what else I can do.”=

“I’ll call them the regulars, the professionals if you will, the people who do this a lot,” Dinowitz said. “So if you’re convicted a second time within two years, you will face a more significant penalty than simply petit larceny.”

The second conviction would automatically become fourth-degree grand larceny — a felony, he said.