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The plucky 11-year-old boy who got taken on a 20-minute joyride by a carjacker over the weekend told The Post Tuesday that he saw right through the “weak” thief’s act.
Quick-witted Dahniel Richardson-Perez was sitting in the front passenger seat of his father’s SUV in East Harlem Sunday night when a “random guy” jumped inside, claiming to know his dad.
“He said he met my dad at a bar but my dad doesn’t go to bars. I knew he was lying,” the street-smart kid recalled.
“I asked him, ‘What’s my dad’s name’ and he couldn’t answer. That’s when I thought he was just a person who carjacked our car.”
The middle schooler’s dad, 36-year-old David Perez, had left the car running on Third Avenue near East 121st Street as he made a quick stop for groceries at City Fresh supermarket on his way home in East Harlem.
“I left my keys in the ignition, but I didn’t think anything would happen,” said Perez, a tattoo artist, adding that he was gone for just a few minutes.
When he got out of the store, groceries in hand, and didn’t see his car there, Perez first assumed he must have parked elsewhere.
“Then it hit me, my car’s gone and my 11-year-old son is in the car,” he said.
His son, meanwhile, was trying to stay calm as the carjacker drove around erratically, causing damage to both the stolen ride and an unoccupied car parked nearby, according to cops.
“It was very scary,” Dahniel said. “I just stayed quiet, kind of panicking a little bit.”
He then pulled out his new iPhone and texted his father: “Dad help.”
“Those two words really hit me,” recalled the still-shaken dad, who had jumped into a cop car with officers from the 25th Precinct while tracking Dahniel’s location on his phone.
“He called me, and when I picked up the phone he was hysterically crying, and I told him, ‘Listen, I want you to put your phone away and preserve the battery, we’re tracking your phone’ and I hung up on him so I could continue tracking him,” Perez remembered.
“At one point, it crossed my mind, I might not get my son back,” Perez said. “What if the guy was a psycho? What if it was a kidnapping?”
The brave boy, a baritone player who is in the sixth grade at Renaissance School of the Arts in East Harlem, said the carjacker tried to snatch the phone — “but he was too weak.”
“He was a skinny guy, with a beard,” Dahniel recalled. “I pulled the phone away from him. He was drunk, so I guess that made him weaker.”
Apparently spooked, the thief — who was still on the loose Tuesday — ended up dropping Dahniel off unharmed at Lafayette and Bolton avenues in the Castle Hill section of the Bronx, more than five miles away.
The sharp kid said of the experience: “It was scary but something to remember.”
“Reuniting was like a whole weight lifted off my shoulders. I got my son back,” his father said.
The incident was “the most scary ordeal I have ever experienced in my life,” Perez added.
“I thank God my son is safe. God protected my son,” said the boy’s mom, Noheme Richardson-Perez.
“My son was responsible enough to use his cellphone and call for help,” she said.
In hindsight, the dad said he never would have left the keys in his car, a 2017 Nissan Rogue, which was found five hours later in Queens.
“You never think something like that would ever happen to you, but apparently, around here that’s what happens,” he said.
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