Thomas MacMillan Photo
After one of his delivery guys fended off two gun-wielding muggers, Steven Sahin expanded his Blake Street pizzeria’s after-sundown no-fly zone.
A map of New Haven hangs on the wall behind the counter of Sahin’s Pizza Heaven II. A yellow line ringing the west side of town indicates the area the pizzeria will deliver to.
A smaller area, including most of Dixwell and Newhallville, is shaded yellow. “No delivery after sunset,” reads a handwritten note. That no-delivery zone is about to expand westward, to include blocks between Dixwell and Beaver Pond Park, Sahin said Monday.
Sahin (pictured) has decided it’s not safe to send his drivers there, after one of them was forced to flee from two gun-wielding bandits early Sunday.
Fast-food outlets around town that offer delivery wrestle with the same question of when to go and where. Their deliverers are regular targets of muggers. Empire Pizza on Whalley Avenue, for instance, has stopped making any deliveries to certain streets (Franklin, Lodge, Brookside, Hamilton, much of Fair Haven) because of repeated hold-ups, according to an employee named Al who spoke by phone Monday. Empire will deliver to Newhallville, but drivers are supposed to stay in the car, he said. Over at Ziggy’s Pizza Restaurant on East Grand Avenue, robberies led to a policy of asking drivers never to leave the car when making deliveries and to leave the scene if someone starts acting odd, according to the owner, who gave his name as Grabeel. However, he said, the business has resisted restricting the delivery area. “Sometimes we don’t want to deliver. But customers want us to deliver,” he said. “We go ahead. You have to be careful.”
Here’s what happened early Sunday with the Pizza Heaven II delivery, according to Sahin:
At around midnight, someone called in a delivery order: wings, soda, and two large pizzas — one bacon, one pepperoni. The caller left a phone number; it seemed like a normal order. The delivery guy, named Ken, set out with the order for a house on Willis Street, between Sherman and Dixwell avenues.
He arrived at the address and had begun to open his car door when two men appeared, one from each side of the car. They had guns — a black one and a silver one.
The one on the driver side put his gun through the open window, pointed at Ken’s head.
“Give me all the fucking money,” he said.
The driver pushed the door hard, slamming it into the gunman, and stepped on the gas. He managed to get away safely. He headed back to the pizzeria and told Sahin. Sahin called the cops.
“He was nervous. He was scared,” Sahin said of Ken. “I sent him home.”
Sahin gave a report to Officer Casey O’Brien.
On Monday, Sahin said he’s instructing his drivers not to deliver to Willis Street anymore, or to any of the other streets west of Dixwell Avenue, at night. In the year that he’s had his pizzeria on Blake Street, Sahin said, he’s learned where he can safely send drivers after dark and where he can’t. His customers have learned, too, he said. They won’t call for delivery from the no-fly zone.
It’s a shame to have to expand the zone, Sahin said. He has good customers there.
“It sucks,” he said. “The good customers are going to cry too.”
Two nights before Sahin’s driver’s encounter, a deliveryman from another New Haven pizza restaurant was held up by three armed men at the same Willis Street address. They carried out that robbery, according to police.
Sgt. Eduardo Diaz, head of the police department’s new robbery/burglary unit, said it’s too early to tell if the same people carried out both attacks. Diaz suggested that local pizza and Chinese-food delivery outlets might want to form a network to share information on attacks.
Paul Bass contributed reporting.