A quick-acting mother tackled a man accused of sucker-punching her 4-year-old son while on a family outing to New York City’s Time Square on Feb. 17.
“I was angry. I sprung into action,” Rafaela Rivera, a bagel factory employee, told The New York Post after the incident. “The mama bear in me came out. I did what any mama would do.”
Rivera said she saw the alleged attacker, Babacar Mbaye, swinging his arms and acting abnormal right before he hit her son Angel Rivera knocking him to the ground, The New York Post reported.
Angel’s 17-year-old sister, Carmen Rivera, was in the city with her family and witnessed the attack, according to The New York Post. “He was walking close to people moving and swinging his arm,” Carmen told the outlet. “I started watching him to see if he’d do anything.”
“I was ticked off, I was outraged,” says Rafaela Rivera after her son Angel, 4, was randomly punched in the head in Times Square. This was the wrong mama to mess with…she went after her son’s attacker. The story on @ABC7NY #nyc #wabc #ch7 #TimesSquare pic.twitter.com/oZG53jqT8P
— Naveen Dhaliwal (@NaveenABC7) February 20, 2022
Rivera described Angel’s attack, saying to the outlet that she heard a “smack real hard” and turned around to find her son on the ground. Carmen then pointed her brother’s attacker out to her mother, Rivera explained. “I grabbed him from the back, and I gave him like a big bear hug, and then I fell to the ground with him,” she said, according to the outlet. “He was moving around.”
Rivera said she received bruises on her arm and legs while Mbaye was trying to get away from her, The New York Post reported. While the two wrestled, Mbaye allegedly spat on her and her daughter, but Rivera recalled saying, “I’m not going to let go, you are not going to get away, I’m going to let the cops get you for hitting my 4-year-old son,” according to the outlet.
When New York Police Department officers arrived, Rivera said the cops told her it was time to let Mbaye go, but she held onto him until one of the officers insisted, “We got him, let him go,” the outlet reported.
Angel’s father, Federico Rivera, was not there at the time of the attack but told The New York Post that it made him “very angry” to know this happened to his son.
“It’s a different New York now – forget it. The crime is out of this world,” he told the outlet. “There is no police presence like it used to be.” (RELATED: 35-Year-Old Woman Stabbed To Death After Suspect Allegedly Followed Her Home)
Mbaye’s lawyer, Thomas Kenniff, admitted his client was given supervised release for punching and kicking a woman in the stomach on Jan. 20 and was released without bail on a desk appearance ticket for a Feb. 3 incident where he allegedly punched a woman in the head on the subway, according to The New York Post.
Kenniff argued at Mbaye’s arraignment that the alleged attack happened while the suspect was dancing “and inadvertently made contact with the child,” The New York Post reported.
The Rivera family told the outlet they avoided taking public transport from their home in NYC’s Bronx neighborhood to Manhattan the day of the incident due to the rising number of attacks on the subway.
In a separate interview with NBC, Rivera said when Mbaye hit her son, it sounded like “somebody got hit in the head with a [half] an empty bottle of water.”
“Why do they keep letting him out? I mean, he a 4-year-old, what if he ended up you know something worse?” Rivera asked in her NBC interview.