She’s “Mommy Bravest.’’
A gun-toting teenager grabbed a pregnant mom’s iPhone as she walked through a Williamsburg park with her 14-month-old daughter — so she handed the baby to a relative and took off after the punk.
“I don’t think a 16-year-old kid really knows how sleep-deprived mothers really are,’’ Rachel Massey, 36, an interior designer who lives in the neighborhood, said yesterday.
“I just reacted. I felt angry and violated, and I was probably in shock. I probably have weird hormones now. I should have felt more fear than I did.”
The chase took place Tuesday in trouble-plagued McCarren Park, the scene of four gunpoint robberies since Monday.
Massey, who moved here from Seattle seven years ago with her husband, was pushing little Olivia in a stroller with a balloon tied to it on their way home.
“The kid was walking . . . about 16 and wearing a black hooded sweat shirt. He was walking directly towards me,” she said. “I was like, ‘What does this kid want?’ ” Massey said, noting that “He seemed a bit nervous. He came at me with the gun out at his waist. It was pointed at my torso . . . I never had a gun pointed at me before.
“He said, ‘Give me your phone!’ ” — then repeated that demand when she hesitated, she recalled. “I gave it him.” Seconds later, as the gunman fled, Massey’s sister, Maureen, arrived.
“It felt so surprising to have a gun pointed at me,” she said.
“I said there was a guy with a gun. ‘Call 911. I’m going to see where he goes,’ ” Massey said.
She handed off her daughter and, “left before she could react.
“I ran after him because I was trying to bring attention to him. He was running faster than I’ve ever seen anyone run,” she said. “I was yelling something to the effect of ‘Keep an eye on that kid. He has a gun!’ and ‘Call the cops!’ ”
A group of people in the park chased the thug, and one cornered him in the tennis courts.
“The kid just gave him the phone,” Massey said. “When I came up, the kid disappeared.”
Yesterday, after talking to her husband, Giovanni, and her mom, Massey admitted that chasing the thief was “ idiotic.’’
“I try not to think too much about what could have happened,’’ she said. “The police said I shouldn’t have done that.”
But she was still fuming about the robber.
“You don’t have to hold a gun to someone — especially a pregnant person with a baby,” Massey said.
Additional reporting by Kirstan Conley