#Looted Bronx bodega receives $5,000 donation to rebuild

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Store owner Daniel Melo of the Matanza Deli & Grocery holds a check for $5K given to him from the United Bodegas of America after his shop was damaged by looters.
G.N.Miller/NYPost

A Bronx bodega ravaged by looters during the George Floyd protests received a $5,000 donation on Sunday to help get back in business.

“When I arrived here and looked at what they’d done, I just wanted to throw the towel in,” said Daniel Melo through a translator, as the Dominican immigrant recalled the heartbreak after his Matanza Deli & Grocery was ransacked earlier this month.

“I thought, how could I lose my business like this after so much work, so much effort in building it?”

Melo, 51, who has owned the Fordham Heights spot for about a year-and-a-half and renovated it just six months ago, arrived after the destruction to find $120,000 in damage and thefts.

A GoFundMe collection taken up by one of Melo’s daughters had raised nearly $40,000 as of Sunday afternoon, and United Bodegas of America presented Melo with a $5,000 check towards rebuilding.

While the protests demanding justice for Floyd — a black man killed May 25 when a white Minneapolis cop knelt on his neck — were largely peaceful, groups of looters took advantage of the chaos to pick over businesses, including Melo’s bodega.

“They ransacked everything inside. They broke all the glass on the refrigerators,” said Melo. “They ripped out the ATM machine.”

Melo found the ATM down the block from the East 188th Street bodega, battered and emptied of its cash.

The store’s security gate had been pried off, and the counter stripped bare of its lotto tickets, cigarettes and over-the-counter medications.

Fernando Mateo, a spokesman for UBA, noted the dark irony of looters using the cover of a protest for racial justice to ransack a minority-run business.

“It’s unfortunate because we all joined in all of the peaceful protests,” said Mateo. “Most people know that bodegas are owned by people of color, minorities, and yet they still broke his storefront.”

The looters were caught on video, and Mateo and Melo are holding out hope that cops can identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice.

“Everyone has the right to protest, but no one has the right to vandalize,” said Melo. “No one has the right to take what I have worked for so hard.”