88-year-old man fights would-be robbers ... and wins

**Buttercup** · 09-22-09, 06:20 PM

88-year-old Kenilworth man fights would-be robbers ... and wins

Tuesday, September 22, 2009 Erin Eileen O'Neill
FOR THE STAR-LEDGER

Biagio Sciscione has trouble walking and usually needs a cane or motorized wheelchair to get around.
But when four people tried stealing a safe from his home, the 88-year-old Kenilworth resident said an adrenaline rush propelled him to his feet and into a front-lawn brawl with the alleged thieves.

It's a fight he won.

"I ran right out there, I dropped my cane and I just went in action," Sciscione, a World War II veteran and retired butcher, said yesterday.

On Sunday morning, a woman came to the couple's front door, claiming to be from a local church. Sciscione said that as he and his wife talked with the woman in the kitchen, a man "in his 40s" and two other women slipped into the house and headed for a bedroom closet where he kept the safe. Sciscione said he spotted the suspects carrying the safe -- which contained jewelry and personal papers -- out the front door, toward a black Lexus sport utility vehicle. That's when he sprung into action.

"I gave him a couple of socks," Sciscione said of the man. The women, he said, pulled at his shirt and clawed his arm with their fingernails.
When Sciscione called out to his 83-year-old wife, Mary, to call the police, the group scattered, he said.

Kenilworth police issued a release yesterday corroborating Sciscione's story. The release said officers responded to the Scisciones home on Monroe Avenue around 10:45 a.m. Sunday, and found the man with cuts and bruises.

"This is particularly disturbing in that the suspects shoved the elderly man to the ground, showing absolutely no regard for the man or his wife," police chief William Dowd said, adding police recovered DNA and fingerprints from the Scisciones' home.
Sciscione said the woman who came to his door was about 18. She claimed to represent a local parish the Scisciones attend and wanted the couple to make a list of the items they needed, he said. Though the couple said they were suspicious from the start, they let her in. Almost immediately, the woman asked to move the conversation into the kitchen, where she began talking about her personal life.

"She was rambling on about how her boyfriend beats her," Mary Sciscione said. The conversation then turned to a dog bite the woman claimed she suffered when she was 9, the couple said. Sciscione soon became bored.

"I couldn't take any more," he said, adding that he walked out of the room.
That's when he spotted the others carrying the safe -- which he said was concealed in a blanket -- from the house.
"My adrenaline went up and my blood pressure went up to 200," said Sciscione, who said he was knocked over in the scuffle.