The man shot point-blank in the head during a horrific caught-on-video robbery at a Manhattan diner is a 37-year-old dad who can’t speak yet but is miraculously still alive, his weeping mom said Friday.
Grace Peña, 70, broke down in tears at the Washington Heights apartment she shares with her son Harrison Ferreiras as she looked at a Facebook photo of him holding his now-8-year-old daughter when the little girl was a toddler in 2017.
“I am heartbroken,” Peña, who uses a walker to get around, said in Spanish to The Post through a translator — adding that the family has yet to tell her granddaughter that the child’s father was gravely injured in the stickup.
Peña said she has been keeping vigil for the past two days by her son’s bedside in the intensive care unit of the Metropolitan Hospital Center, where he is hooked up to tubes and can’t speak but remains alert — flashing “grateful” thumbs-up signs at his medical caretakers.
“[Police] came knocking on my door,” Peña recalled of the moment she learned of the shooting. “Even if I had to crawl, I would have gone [to the hospital]. I was crying.”
Ferreiras was eating at the counter of the Seafood King Fish Market at Broadway and West 163rd Street just before 2 a.m. Wednesday when the masked robber — who had already stolen cash and cellphones from both the patron and a cashier — senselessly pressed a distinctive blue gun against the diner’s head and fired a single shot, hitting him in the right cheek.
Ferreiras collapsed to the floor as a pool of blood formed around him.
He seemed to attempt to get up before the cashier, who had been hiding behind the counter, rushed to his side, according to footage obtained by The Post.
He was hospitalized in critical condition, police said.
A worker at the eatery Friday said Ferreiras is a fairly frequent customer who typically orders “salmon, yellow rice, sometimes soup.
“I feel bad because he’s a good person, a good customer. He respects everyone — no trouble with him,” she said.
