Nine-year-old foils $164,000 robbery
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NEW YORK (Reuters) -- A quick-witted nine-year-old boy thwarted robbers who made it out of his home with $164,000 in cash before they were nabbed by police alerted to the caper by his covert cell phone call.
Shidal Hossain used a blanket to hide a cell phone when the unidentifed robbers came to rob his home and then slipped into his bedroom to call his father for help.
Shidal was watching cartoons with his four brothers -- one of them just nine days old -- when the trio of robbers knocked on the door of the family's Brooklyn home Thursday morning.
Pretending to be building maintenance workers, they persuaded Shidal's 3-year-old brother to open the door before charging in and threatening Shidal's mother and brothers with what turned out to be a pellet gun.
Police nabbed them on the street nearby and recovered the $164,000 in cash, which the family was hoping to send back to relatives in Bangladesh.
Shidal remembers being "a little" scared when his mother spoke to him in Bangladeshi, telling him to sneak away with the family's cell phone to call his father. "My mom gave me the telephone. I hid it under the blanket," he said Friday.
"I was in Pennsylvania when he called me," the elder Hossain said. So, he called relatives, neighbors and the police. "He did a good job," he said of Shidal, who is going into the fourth grade this autumn.
Kevin Munoz, 19, Abab Villanueva, 22 and Arelin Cales, 22, were being held by police on charges including robbery, burglary and grand larceny.
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