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The 61-year-old woman who two Queens pizza men tried to save from a mugging says she’s “overwhelmed with gratitude” for the pair of pie heroes, who each wound up getting stabbed by the vicious attackers.
Tough-as-nails Korean immigrant Eun Hee Chang said she also got stabbed in the incident, but she’s just fine and even went to work as a home health care aide the next day, she said in an interview with WABC News.
Hailie Kim, housing organizer at the Minkwon Center for Community Action, told the Post Thursday that Chang doesn’t have any ill will toward her attackers.
“She said she felt bad for the perpetrators because they are young men and she doesn’t want to ruin their lives,” Kim said. “She doesn’t want to do anything to hurt them. There is no anger on her part.”
Kim said Chang also told her that “the focus should be on the men who helped her, not her.”
In the ABC interview, the station paraphrased the Korean-speaking Chang’s words, in which she described barely realizing she got cut and going home after the violent attack Saturday night outside Louie’s pizzeria in Elmhurst.
Surveillance video shows three men walking up behind her and assaulting her as she pushed a shopping cart, stabbing her in the back.
She told ABC she didn’t realize what was happening and said the knife plunged into her back felt like she had been punched.
Chang said she ran to the nearby pizzeria because she’s a regular — prompting restaurant owner Louie Suljovic, 38, and his 68-year-old father, Cazim Suljovic, to chase the thugs.
Both men were stabbed by the suspects and suffered punctured lungs, but held on to the thieves long enough for cops to show up and collar two of the brutes.
“You can’t let it go,” Cazim Suljovic told The Post this week. “I have a mother. I have sisters. Thank God I only had fingers [to fight them]. If I had something else, a different story would have happened.”
Robert Whack, 30, and his brother-in-law, Supreme Gooding, 18, were hit with charges including assault, harassment and criminal possession of a weapon — with Whack also facing an attempted murder charge.
The cowardly pair was also charged with grand larceny for allegedly snatching a purse with $2,500 from a 75-year-old woman on March 16, authorities said.
Chang said she went home after the attack, where her building superintendent realized she was losing blood, she told the outlet.
And she went to work the following day, saying she needed to make a living.
Kim told The Post that Chang now has mixed feelings about the Big Apple in the wake of the attack — a mix of both fear and gratitude.
“She did say she was afraid of stepping out again,” Kim said. “But she also expressed that after knowing how the father and the son stepped up to protect her and defend her, she kind of also felt a sort of connection to the community which she hasn’t felt before.
“She was very grateful for it and that makes her feel safe.”
Nonetheless, Kim said attacks against Asian-Americans continue to be a major concern in the city.
“Obviously, it’s worrying that attacks on our community are rising so rapidly,” she said. “A lot of fear that we have been seeing is perpetrated by the xenophobic language against the Asian American community since COVID started.
“If you look at the fact that violence against Asian Americans has gone up 360 percent, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we are being targeted.”
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