Big Apple crime was too much for this mama to “bear.”
The heroic Bronx mother who landed on The Post’s front page as “Mama Bear” — when she ferociously fought off the creep who sucker-punched her 4-year-old son in Times Square — has fled the city with her three cubs.
On Jan. 27, nearly a year after the horrifying Feb. 17 attack on her son Angel, Rafaela Rivera and her husband, Federico, loaded Angel, now 5, Carmen, 18, and Federico Jr., 15, into their red Toyota Scion and headed south to the “calmer” environs of Myrtle Beach, SC.
“It’s a relief. Everybody is angry in New York, the atmosphere. Everybody has to be on their toes,” Rivera, 43, said this week from her new beachfront digs. “It was the punch and every day waking up, hearing about shootings, killings, it became too much.
“I wouldn’t even turn the news on. My 15-year-old was worried about going on trains,” she added.
The family initially chose fight, rather than flight.
“Right after Thanksgiving, we decided to give the city until the end of the year,” Rivera said. “But the crime kept getting worse and every morning you would keep hearing about stabbings, killings. robberies. So that was it. At the end of the year, we decided to start a new journey. We had been on vacation [in Myrtle Beach] in June and we had a blast.”
A week after trading the Bronx for the sun belt, Rivera said her family is “making new friends and enjoying great southern food, biscuits and gravy and sweet tea.”
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“I’m happy,” Angel, now in a local kindergarten, said through his mom, adding he “loves to go play in the beach and the sand and make new friends.”
Rivera recalled the attack vividly. She, Angel, and Carmen had taken an Uber to Manhattan, avoiding the subway, for a photo shoot for Angel, an aspiring model.
After the shoot, they were enjoying the balmy 59-degree afternoon at the Crossroads of the World when Carmen spotted a man acting strangely.
“My daughter thought to herself that she would keep an eye on the guy, but I wish she would have told me, so I would have put the baby between me and Carmen,” Rivera said in hindsight, adding, “If he would hit anybody, it would have been me.”
The unhinged man swung his arm, hitting little Angel in the face, causing him to fall backward onto the pavement, authorities said.
“I heard my baby crying. My daughter pointed at the guy and then I told her, ‘Stay with the baby, and I took off and told him, ‘You just hit my baby, why don’t you hit me or [pick on] somebody your own size!” Rivera recounted. “It was him and me and I was ready to put him in a chokehold. When I was little I did taekwondo. He wasn’t going to get away.”
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Rivera, who was born in Texas and raised in Florida, grabbed the 5-foot-7, 150-pound suspect from behind and put him in a “big bear hug” and “fell to the ground with him.” The mom said she held on for dear life until cops arrived.
Police charged Babacar Mbaye, 34, a repeat offender with 51 arrests on his rap sheet, with assault and endangering the welfare of a child. Mbaye is currently being held at Rikers Island on $30,000 bail.
Rivera said she returned to Times Square with Angel and Carmen in October for the first time since the terrifying incident, but it was “overwhelming.”
Mama Bear said her family is getting used to their new den, a condo-style studio apartment by the beach. The plan is to use their savings to eventually buy a three-bedroom home.
“They treat you here very well,” Rivera said.
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The former bagel factory worker has no regrets.
“It’s getting crazy [in New York City] … It’s starting to look like California and Skid Row,” she lamented. “Everybody’s moving this way. I have friends who want to move too. They are just tired of it.”
New York City is statistically “safer” than Myrtle Beach, but a 2022-2023 U.S. News & World listing of “best places to live” ranked the southern city 37th and the Big Apple 120th.
“I love New York. I will go back to visit. But I just won’t live there anymore,” Rivera said.
