Don’t let your daughters move to New York City.
That’s the heart-wrenching advice of the father of a city schoolteacher who is still devastated after being sexually assaulted at gunpoint by an off-duty cop last summer.
“It’s a dangerous city,” said the dad, whose name and location are being withheld to protect the identity of his 25-year-old daughter.
“When things like this happen, it just makes you think twice,” the dad told The Post from his small, out-of-state farm.
Last week, his daughter’s brutal attacker, ex-Washington Heights-based cop Michael Pena, was convicted of enough charges of sex assault to put him away for up to life.
Jurors agreed that a drunken Pena had stalked the woman as she set out at dawn from her Inwood apartment for her first day of teaching at a Bronx charter school.
Pena then pulled his gun on the terrified woman, dragging her into a back yard and threatened to shoot her in the face if she cried out or opened her eyes.
But jurors could not agree on whether she’d actually been raped. The woman broke into gut-wrenching sobs in the courtroom last Wednesday upon learning of the jury deadlock.
The victim’s father told The Post that he joins his daughter in feeling shattered by the mixed verdict.
“She’s very upset and she just needs her time right now,” he said. “I don’t think she’s ready to talk to anyone. You know, it’s not over yet.”
The attack has shaken the trust he once had in the people hired to protect citizens, said the father, himself retired from a law-enforcement job.
“I’m an ex-cop, you know,” he said. “They’re the people you’re supposed to be able to trust — but I guess it’s not like that anymore.”