A 7-year-old nonverbal autistic boy with a gift of remembering maps was on his way to the Empire State Building when he disappeared from a Queens restaurant and traveled alone to Midtown Manhattan, his mother told the Daily News on Saturday.
“He was very, very close [to getting there],” grateful mom Farjana Akond said about her son Ruwaid Karim’s wild, two-borough journey to try to reach the famed landmark. “I never thought that he could do that.”
After walking out of the Dera Restaurant on Broadway in Jackson Heights around 11:45 a.m. Friday, Ruwaid surfaced about three hours later, four miles away, walking past 58th St. at Lexington Ave.
“I went to the restroom to wash my hands, and just in two minutes, I see he disappeared,” the stunned mother recalled. “He’s never been out on the street, so I was very worried.”
Ruwaid was less than 25 blocks from the iconic skyscraper when a woman spotted him darting into traffic. She managed to grab him before he was hit and called 911.
“He went across the crosswalk when it was still red, and there were cars coming,” the Good Samaritan, who Akond identified as Christina, said at a press conference Friday. “And then when we hit 57th, the cars were going both ways and he ran into the middle of the street. There were two different cars going each way that stopped and they were honking their horns, and he just kept going, and I was trying to get him but I didn’t want to get hit either, so he was a little more of a hero than I was running into the middle of the street.”
Cops quickly brought Akond to Midtown to be reunited with her son.
Ruwaid and his mother are from Texas and were visiting New York City to take in the sights with Akond’s sister, who had flown in from London.
“We are just here for to visit the New York landmarks. He’s very interested in landmarks,” she said of her son. [He wants to see] the Empire State Building and 1 World Trade Center. He wants to visit the [site of the] Avengers Tower.”
Akond and Ruwaid had visited the Big Apple last year, but didn’t get a chance to go to the Empire State Building. She knew it was on her son’s list of places to go — but she never thought he would try to go on his own.
Police believe the architecture-loving tyke managed to take a train to Manhattan, Akond said.
“[The police said] there’s no other options. To get there, he had to take the train,” she said. “Even on the cameras, they noticed that he went down in the subway.
“It was a horrible three hours for me,” she said. “The only thing that was coming to my mind was what could happen while crossing the streets? He’s never been in the bus or train by himself. I was thinking all the bad stuff. It was tough.”
On Saturday morning, little Ruwaid was smiling from ear to ear as he held two figurines in each hand — one of the Eiffel Tower, the other of the Statue of Liberty — and was raring to go on his next sightseeing adventure.
And he’s got the whole trip mapped out in his head.
“He has a very good photographic memory of the maps,” his mother said. “So whenever he is with a device, he loves to browse the maps. He wants to see how to get there.
“He’s OK,” she said about her adventurous child. “He feels like he’s a big boy. He’s just OK. Like, there’s nothing to worry about.”
