A nail salon owner in Manhattan responded to a robbery attempt by pushing the robber, shoving his gun down his pants, and chasing him out the door and down the street. “I wasn’t scared,” Annie Sheng told WABC 7, chuckling.
In a story we saw via Gothamist, WABC reports that the attempted robbery happened Wednesday night, when a man in a dark hat and a plaid shirt walked into Peony Nails Spa near Union Square. He asked Sheng if she was the manager; when she replied that she was, he drew a gun, told her “Don’t talk,” then demanded money.
Sheng told WABC her young daughter was in the shop; so were about ten customers and two children, playing just feet from the man. Annie was not having it.
“I said, ‘I don’t give you nothing,’” she told WABC. “First time, I just used my hand to push back. I pushed the gun back, then I pushed him and he go run away.”
Sheng chased the man out of the shop and down the street a little way before calling 911. In talking to the Post, she was almost comically matter-of-fact:
“He is scared. He run away and I follow him,” Sheng said. She then returned to the shop, called police, and went right back to work.
“If he takes the gun out we are in danger,” she explained. “He tried to take it out and I pushed back.”
“She should have done it,” Sheng’s daughter told WABC. “But at the same time, it was dangerous.”
The New York Post says the man fits the description of someone who’s been robbing other nail salons at gunpoint. Sheng is 5'4" and weighs 120 pounds, while the man is about 5'11, 160 pounds, and (presumably) extremely embarrassed.
With the stipulation that this could have turned out horribly: it’s nice to take a break from the frequently bad news about New York City’s nail salons. And nicer still that the whole world now knows Annie Sheng is not ever to be fucked with.