New York woman puts up a fight during robbery, attack

Shadi Rahimi

Saturday, Dec. 3, 2005 | 7:21 a.m.

Assuming that the tall, clean-cut man rapidly approaching her on 175th Avenue in Queens, N.Y., Thursday morning sought to steal her purse, Marilyn Toppin, 65, wrapped the strap of her small black purse around her left wrist. But it was her car -- an avocado green 2000 Toyota Avalon -- that he was after.

The man did not say a word before grabbing Toppin's shoulders and tossing her to the ground. As he lunged toward her left hand, in which she clutched her purse and car keys, Toppin began kicking, clawing and screaming: "Help! Help!"

Faces peered out of the windows of homes near the corner of Hillside Avenue, where Toppin lay on her back on the sidewalk near the car she had parked moments earlier, but no one came to help, she said. So she kept fending off her attacker as he lunged at her.

"I don't know what came into my head to fight back, but I wasn't giving up my pocketbook," she said in an interview Thursday afternoon at her Queens home.

Toppin's son Christopher Toppin, 47, a retired New York City police officer who now works as a Clark County School District police officer in Las Vegas, said by telephone that he was not shocked that his mother had fought back, calling her a resilient woman "with guts," who "picked herself up and moved ahead."

On Thursday, someone called the police about 9:05 a.m., and officers arrived at the scene at 9:06, the police said. But it was too late. The man, whom Toppin described as about 6 feet tall, 160 pounds, black and in his 30s, had wrestled away her keys, leaving two scratches on her middle knuckles, and driven off toward the Van Wyck Expressway.

No arrests have been made, the police said.

Before she drove the Toyota off the dealer's lot in 1999, it was blessed by her pastor from the Jamaica Seventh-day Adventist Church on 163rd Street as a "missionary car," Toppin said. She used it mostly to fulfill her duties as a deaconess, she said, including transporting the sick and the elderly to doctor's appointments.

As the man raced away, Toppin thought, "It's like Satan himself is driving that car," she said.

Toppin, who was born in Trinidad and moved to New York City in 1969, calls herself a fighter.

"But I don't mean it in a physical way," she said. "I just refuse to give up."

When her husband died of a heart attack in 1976 and she was left to raise four children alone, Toppin taught herself to drive in four days by practicing up and down the snowy street of her home, and took a second job as a private nurse, said her daughter, Christine Youngclause, 43.

"She's feisty," Youngclause said. "She don't give for nothing."