A nurse who flew up from Florida to pitch in at New York City’s overwhelmed hospitals during the coronavirus pandemic was thanked by Gotham’s worst — when she was mugged in a practically abandoned Times Square.
Stacy Coco and her friend, a fellow Florida nurse, had just gotten off their 12-hour overnight shift at Jacobi Medical Center and an hour-long commute on the subway Sunday morning when they were walking through the famed tourist spot.
It was Coco’s first time in the Big Apple. The pair had flown up a week earlier for an eight-week contract with the city and were put up in the Millennium Hotel.
“We heard nurses were getting sick and some were dying. We thought if we came up here, we could help. I know it sounds corny … but when you have that in your heart, that’s what you want to do for people,” Coco said.
It was around 8:30 a.m. She stood awestruck in front of the “Good Morning America” set in Times Square and stopped to snap a photo.
But then, out of nowhere, a thug pushed Coco down and ran off with her cellphone.
“I don’t even know where he came from,” Coco recalled.
“It’s got pictures and voicemail of my mother on there that died a year ago, December 2018 … and that’s all I have of her.”
Stacy Coco (right) and her friend and fellow nurse Kimberly Allen flew up from Florida to help out in NYC hospitals.Her friend, Kimberly Allen, wanted to chase after the thief.
“She wanted to chase after the criminal but she didn’t want to get shot,” Coco said.
A distraught Coco and her friend went to the nearby NYPD precinct house after tracking the iPhone — but were met by a rude cop, apparently unwilling to help.
“We can’t put you in the back seat in the car and go find that phone, it’s a pandemic,” Coco recalled of the exchange.
Yet that’s exactly what a police captain did when he overheard the nurse’s story.
The supervisor ordered two NYPD officers to drive the nurses around the city for more than two hours to find the thief.
“Every time we got close to it would move,” Coco said in frustration.
“These two police officers gave us so much of their time,” she recalled, saying the two didn’t want to stop.
She never found the thief.
“I cried for two days and got a new phone,” she said.
The American flag illuminates a street in Times Square amid the COVID-19 pandemic.AFP via Getty Images“When I called in to work that evening, all the person in the staffing could do is laugh, ‘I’m so sorry, you gotta keep everything close to you in New York,'” she remembered them saying.
“This isn’t Florida,” Coco said jokingly.
