Most kids get a timeout or a spanking for bad behavior, but a 7-year-old Bronx boy was arrested and handcuffed to a police precinct wall for hours on a robbery rap, police sources said.
The mother of the pint-sized “perp” is threatening to sue the NYPD for $250 million — saying cops treated her son like a hardened criminal after he allegedly punched a 9-year-old boy in the face and took $5 from him, her lawyer and a police source said Tuesday.
Police arrested the child in his third-grade classroom at Public School 114 on Cromwell Ave., detained him at the school for four hours and then kept him in custody at the 44th Precinct for six hours after the December incident, the woman’s lawyer said in a statement Monday. He couldn’t be reached for further comment Tuesday.
A second police source who has direct knowledge of the incident said Tuesday that the little terror knocked the other boy to the ground, leaving the victim with a bloody mouth and fat lip.
The lawyer is calling the allegations against the 7-year-old false and says he has filed a notice of claim against the NYPD, the city and the South Bronx precinct.
“How would you feel if (the boy) was your child or your grandchild?” lawyer Jack Yankowitz said in a press release. “What happened is a travesty of justice.
“If (this) 7-year-old and his mother lived on 64th and Park and he attended a $35,000-a-year private school, do you think (he) would have been arrested, handcuffed to a wall and denied access to his mother and legal counsel for 10 hours?”
But an NYPD spokeswoman said Tuesday the boy was held for just four hours and 40 minutes.
“The attorney is fabricating the amount of time the child was in custody,” Inspector Kim Royster said.
Royster refused to comment further, citing the ages of the kids.
Yankowitz said cops intimidated, verbally abused and interrogated the child and said the boy was humiliated by officers shouting “thief” and threatening to put him away “with the big boys.”
“These officers are not fit to serve the citizens of New York City, and this must never happen again,” Yankowitz said in the release.
But the first police source insisted that cops followed the rules when they arrested the accused bully.
“Everything was done properly,” the cop source said. “He was arrested for a robbery. He was taken to the precinct and put in the juvenile room. His parent was allowed to see him.”
Babying the boy wasn’t an option, the second police source added.
“He had to be handcuffed — he was a prisoner. If we didn’t handcuff him and he ran out the front door, then we would have had an escaped prisoner on our hands.”
The source said charges could not have been filed against a child 6 and under, but kids 7 to 17 can be charged as juveniles.
Cops treated the boy as kindly as possible, the source added.
“We let him have pizza,” the source said. “We let him see his mother.”
The alleged beatdown occurred about 2 p.m. at 1155 Cromwell Ave., the address of P.S. 114, but it happened off school grounds, the second police source said.
The boy was charged but has not yet appeared in Family Court. Relatives at his Bronx apartment declined comment.
The cop source close to the incident said the 7-year-old had been bullying the victim for some time, prompting the victim’s mom to call for a meeting with teachers and the suspect’s mom.
“This kid is no angel, even though he may look like it,” the source said. “We made the arrest based on the complainant aggressively complaining about what the defendant did to him.”
“This wasn’t something where one kid runs off with another kid’s basketball. This 7-year-old attacked someone and took his money. There’s a little more to this story than it appears."
By Rocco Parascandola , Chelsia Rose Marcius AND Daniel Beekman / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
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