Dad: Burglars stole van used for disabled teen

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Updated: March 7, 2012 9:56AM

Callous burglars allegedly tortured a 70-year-old man with a red-hot spoon and stole the van he uses to transport his disabled son.

BT Gregory says he had popped out to get his 17-year-old son a snack from a nearby hot dog stand Friday afternoon when two burglars armed with a gun barged into his high-rise apartment in the 1300 block of North Cleveland.

The burglars, who were rifling through his possessions when he came home, duct-taped him to a chair at gunpoint and threatened to kill him, he said.

“I thought we were going to die,” he said. “They turned up the TV as loud as it would go and said they would shoot.”

His son, Pleasure Herron — a wheelchair-bound cerebral palsy patient and a special education student at Whitney Young — was scared but did not understand what was happening, Gregory said.

The burglars hit the boy, then heated up a spoon over the stove and held it against Gregory’s hand to force him to give up the PIN number for his bank card, he added.

They ransacked his home, taking $300 cash, jewelry, car keys and other possessions that they stuffed into pillow cases, leaving 10 minutes before the building’s doorman began his shift at 5 p.m., Gregory said.

Though he was duct-taped to a chair, Gregory managed to scoot over to a cell phone and dial 911, but police arrived after the burglars had fled in his 2000 Ford Windstar he used to transport his son in his wheelchair, he said.

Comments the burglars made about a woman he had never heard of “ratting me out” led him to believe that they mistook his apartment for someone else’s, he said.

“It makes no sense,” he said. “I hardly have anything, and what I do have is to support my son.”

Police were still searching Sunday for the men, described only as two black men in their early- to mid-20s.

Belmont Area detectives are investigating.