The grieving family of a 64-year-old Manhattan supermarket worker who died after a scuffle with a would-be beer thief had warned him not to be a hero — but he didn’t heed their advice.
Leobardo Hernandez’s kin repeatedly told the doting dad of four to let security handle shoplifters at Morton Williams at Columbus Circle, but the hard-working immigrant had a knack for helping others and wasn’t one to look the other way, his kin told The Post.
“We told him plenty of times,” his son, Henry Hernandez, 31, said Tuesday. “When we used to sit in the car, going someplace he’d start telling us stories like, ‘Look, this happened, that happened.’ We used to look at him like, ‘Dad, you are not the security. Leave that to the store. And if they want to rob the store, that’s not your store. Let them take whatever they want.’
“He would say ‘no,’” he said. “For him it ain’t right. My father was the type of person that if it ain’t right, he’d step in. Even if he didn’t know you, if he saw that something was wrong with you, he’d step in.”
Leobardo Hernandez, who worked night shifts at the Ninth Avenue store, was at work around 9:15 p.m. Friday when a crook tried to steal a six-pack of Heineken beer.
The clerk intervened, and got into a “physical altercation” with the thug, according to police.
The crook slugged Hernandez in the chest and ran off empty-handed — leaving the older man lying on a milk crate inside the store, where he was found unresponsive.
He was pronounced dead at the hospital, while the shoplifter remains on the loose, police said.
“A job is a job, a life is a life,” Henry Hernandez said. “You can lose a job and find another. But you can lose your life and never find another one. At the end of the day we are still trying to figure out what happened. It’s not only sad, but it pisses you off.”
The dead man’s family said Leobardo Hernandez and his wife of 44 years, Hortencia, migrated from Mexico three decades ago to build a better life and find “the American Dream.”
The couple is originally from Oaxaca, and Leobardo had been working at Morton Williams for about 10 years, while taking other jobs to help make ends meet for his children and four grandchildren.
“I want this guy caught,” one co-worker at Mason Williams said of the shoplifter who ran off. “The streets are getting worse. They use knifes. They use guns. It’s not good out there.
“[The thief] had a black mask covering his face, right up to his eyes so you couldn’t see his face,” the worker said. “The law is lenient. If it ain’t a certain amount of collars, they let them go.”
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