This little cowboy’s toy gun was a bit too real.
An East Village 11-year-old was handcuffed and taken into custody last month after strolling into MS 345 on the Lower East Side with a play pistol — a black plastic prop given to him by an after-school theater company.
Violeta Hernandez, 68, said her grandson, whose name is being withheld by The Post, was supposed to be a cowboy in a play at the Theater for the New City in the East Village.
Instead, the pint-size actor was suspended and shipped off to an “alternative-learning facility” in Harlem for two weeks and is still traumatized by the ordeal, she said.
“This was an abuse,” the grandmother said. “I want him to feel better. I don’t want him to be scared of police. Now he’s afraid when he goes to school.”
Hernandez says the prop was only a toy. But cops and school officials claim it was a BB gun.
“A BB gun is considered a dangerous weapon and is not allowed on school property per the DOE’s discipline code,” said Department of Education spokeswoman Marge Feinberg. “When the BB gun was discovered, the school called the police.”
A police source told The Post the gun was classified as an “air pistol,” which fires pellets using compressed air. “It looked like a real gun,” the source said.
The sixth-grader was reinstated at the school at a hearing Wednesday.
He told The Post he had the gun in his backpack on Nov. 7. When he fell asleep on the school bus that morning, a bully rifled through his bag and discovered the prop.
The bully later demanded he hand it over. The young actor refused, so the vindictive classmate told Principal Judith De Los Santos-Pena and a school security staffer called police.
Cops arrived shortly after to cuff the frightened kid and haul him to the 7th Precinct.
“I was scared,” the boy said. “I was imagining that they were going to put me in a cell. It wasn’t fair.”
Hernandez said she had no idea anything was amiss until she got a call from cops — three hours after they took her grandson into custody.
“I said, ‘Why did they have to arrest him?” Hernandez said through tears. “It’s a plastic gun. Police had to do it because the school had called.”
A rep for the after-school theater company wrote the school a letter claiming “full responsibility for the theater prop gun,” but it wasn’t enough to stop the suspension.
The family is considering legal action against the school.“This was an excessive use of force,” said the boy’s attorney, Daniel Pepitone of Manhattan Legal Services. “We’re talking about treating children terribly and creating mistrust in the very people they should look to when they need help.”
“It’s baffling that out of the principal, the vice principal and the security officers — none of these adults could figure out the prop was a toy,” he said.