85-Year-Old Man Plays Dead as 3 Masked Men Rob His Apartment

GREENPOINT, NY — An 85-year-old man said he played dead while three men with masked faces robbed his apartment in broad daylight Tuesday in northern Brooklyn.

Around 2 p.m. in the afternoon, Pablo Roldan was taking a nap inside his home at 195 Huron St. when he heard a knock on the door, he told CBS2. When he opened the door, three men in black with hoods covering their faces pushed him into his apartment and demanded his money, Roldan said.

One of the men violently held Roldan down on the couch while the other two trashed his apartment looking for cash, he said.

"They push in, and choke me out," he told CBS2.

Somehow they knew he had $36,000 in cash hidden in a closet for his sick wife to pay her medical bills, he said. He tried to give them his wallet, but they were looking for the cash.

"That was my life savings in there," Roldan said.

That's when Roldan pretended he was dying, hoping they wouldn't kill him, he said. Roldan survived, with bruises to his wrists and eye.

The elderly man described the three men as Hispanic, and one of them he described as 6 feet tall and aged 20 to 30, the NYPD told Patch.

"Was so tall and strong that I could not fight back," he told CBS2.

It's unclear just how much cash the three men got away with. There have been no arrests, and the investigation is ongoing, cops said Thursday.

Some Greenpoint residents in a closed Facebook group for the neighborhood discussed setting up a GoFundMe to help Roldan out with his wife's medical bills. Others commented that it seems these three men targeted Roldan because they knew exactly just how much cash he had buried in the closet.

"That doesn't at all sound like a random crime - they knew he had a lot of money in the house," one commenter wrote.

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