A heartless thief is believed to have crashed a fund-raiser and made off with a bag of cash meant to help a city firefighter pay for life-changing surgery for his 9-year-old son.
But feisty little Aidan Sullivan — who was born with a facial defect and no right ear — yesterday put up a brave front, with a message for the crook: “I’m going to kick your butt!”
“I want to look normal,” said Aidan, whose dad, Tim, is a Bronx firefighter.
The Brewster third-grader has hemifacial microsoma, in which one half of the face doesn’t develop correctly.
Last weekend family pal Peter Drake, a Ridgefield, Conn., firefighter, hosted a fund-raiser, collecting between $8,000 and $9,000.
But when the party at a Danbury, Conn., Irish cultural center was over, the money had disappeared.
“At the end of the night, all the money that was donated was put in a zippered bag,” said Tim Sullivan. “A bartender gave the bag to Pete . . . He had it in his hands. He put it down to go do something, and when he came back, he saw that it was missing.”
Sullivan said his longtime friend — who has had fund-raisers to pay for Aidan’s 10 previous surgeries — is “devastated.”
“Listening to a 47-year-old man cry, and not about his mother dying, was brutal,” Sullivan said.
“Pete was so upset. He kept saying, ‘I let Aidan down, I let Aidan down,’ ” Colleen Sullivan, 40, recalled.
“We even went Dumpster diving, in case it was thrown out.”
The Sullivans plan to go ahead with the March 1 surgery led by specialists at NYU’s Langone Medical Center in Manhattan. The money would have offset the $10,000 to $15,000 that insurance doesn’t cover.
Yesterday, Aidan said he’s not a fan of hospitals and doesn’t like to be away from his sister, Kaylee, 4. But he’s willing to do it.
“I’m excited,” he said. “Finally, an ear.”