Terror struck a swanky Gramercy street Friday night, when a stranger followed a 30-year-old woman home, forced his way into her apartment and threw her to the floor.
The fiend is still at large — having run off when the scrappy woman chomped down on the hand he held to her mouth to stifle her screams.
“This has just been very traumatic for us,” said the victim’s husband, who asked that her name be withheld.
The woman was attacked a moment after walking home from the Union Square subway station to her building on 20th Street — right up the block from the Grammercy Tavern and the Teddy Roosevelt House.
She had just closed the door to her second floor apartment when she heard a knock, a law enforcement source told The Post.
Instead of looking through the peep-hole, she opened the door, thinking it was her husband, and then telling the strange man who stood there, “You must have the wrong apartment.”
She opens it a bit, and this guy slams his way in,” the source said.
Shut the f— up!’ the monster shouted as he tried to muffle her screams with a cloth.
Then, “She bites the perp hard on the hand, and he flips out and runs away,” the source said.
The man fled with a silver medallion he’d ripped from her necklace. Police are describing him as in his 20s or 30s, with medium dark skin, and wearing a white shirt.
“This is only the fifth time since 1979 that the police have been here,” in the building – with most of those visits being for minor break-ins, noted one fearful neighbor.
“I want to know, where did this person come from?” said the neighbor, a 72-year-old retired airline manager who’d made the 911 call after hearing the woman’s screams and coming to her aid.
“How much more cautious can we be?”