Life Imitates Art

Like a scene straight out of the famous HG Wells novel, The Time Machine, a man and his girlfriend were robbed at gunpoint in Central Park, just seconds after he proposed:

Jacunski got on one knee and popped the question to his girlfriend of six months, Mami Nagase, in a romantic spot at a gazebo in Central Park on Saturday night. She had just agreed to marry him when, they said, a gunman jumped from the bushes and yelled, “Give me your money and get on the ground!”

Here’s where it diverts from the story: Jacunski was able to slip the engagement ring off his girlfriend’s finger and hide it in his pocket, without the assailant noticing.

In the book/movie, the fight over the ring led to the doomed girlfriend getting shot. (Or was it stabbed)?

So the robber got away with some cash, and the couple had to spend the rest of the evening looking at mugshots instead of having a romantic dinner at a French restaurant.

It could have been much worse….she could have been shot dead, and he could have spent the next five years feverishly working on a time machine so he could go back in time and undo what happened, only to wind up 800,000 years in the future fighting Morelocks.

That was a close call for them.

H/T: Crime Scene KC