A young banker walking to a West Village hotspot was tackled and had her jaw cracked by a pair of brutal muggers, but got no help from people on the street until after she bravely drove the thugs off with a can of Mace.
The frightening assault Thursday night came three weeks after another woman was violently thrown to the ground and robbed on the busy stretch of West 11th Street near the Magnolia Bakery.
“Anyone who lives in the West Village knows that you walk everywhere. We walk at all hours,” said the banker, 25, who asked that her name not be used.
Around 11 p.m., she was heading to meet a friend at the celeb hangout The Spotted Pig a few blocks away. As she walked down the sidewalk, two men came from around the corner and headed straight for her.
“From a distance, I felt like they didn’t belong,” she said. “I had a strange feeling.”
She pulled Mace out of her purse.
“They got closer to me,” she said. “They started walking really fast, and they split up and approached me from either side.”
One of the men had something in his hand that looked like a gun.
“They pushed me to the ground . . . I crumbled pretty easily because I thought it was a gun . . . I started screaming, ‘I don’t know what you want. I’ll give you whatever you want.’
“They continued to punch me.”
She was pinned on her right side – the hand in which she had the Mace.
That’s when she drew upon skills learned in a self-defense class and freed her arm. She sprayed the Mace, and the mist luckily hit her attackers’ faces.
Once they had gone, a resident came outside to comfort her and called 911. The woman was treated for a broken jaw at nearby St. Vincent’s Hospital.
The crooks got away with the woman’s earrings – but didn’t get her purse, cops said.
In the previous incident, a 26-year-old actress was knocked to the sidewalk around 10:45 p.m. on Nov. 18 by two people she thought were girls.
She held on to her purse as the muggers dragged her . “I’m unemployed! There’s nothing in there! You chose the wrong person!” the woman yelled.
Actually, she said, there was a lot of stuff in the purse – an iPod, money and credit cards. For some reason, the attackers ran off with only her BlackBerry, which was in her hands.