DENVER (CBS4) – Denver police have arrested a boy accused of trying to hold up a very stubborn grandmother in her antique store.

The attempted robbery was on East Dakota Street right off South Broadway on Jan. 26.

The Treasured Scarab Antiques owner Syrma Sotiriou is relieved police have the suspect in custody and she is quite ready to lecture the would-be robber on the need to respect his elders and himself.

“At some point along the way I probably would have smacked him upside the head if I’d gotten close enough,” Sotiriou said.

Sotiriou, a grandmother of four, has owned the antique store for more than three decades, and she wasn’t about to be intimidated by someone who she says was a preteen robber.

“I actually think the gun might have been a toy gun, and I’m not sure I wouldn’t have tried to knock it out of his hand,” she said. “I was mad. He was a kid.”

An image of the suspect (credit: Denver Police Department)

Sotiriou was helping a customer when the boy came in waving a weapon and demanding jewelry. But neither customer nor owner buckled.

“He had a gun and pointed it at me and he said, ‘Lay down on the floor.’ And I didn’t take him seriously because he was a kid,” she said.

An image of the suspect (credit: Denver Police Department)

She grabbed her panic button calling an alarm company and police and the youthful thief ran off. He was arrested Tuesday afternoon.

Her linen hankies, her family photos, and her endless strands of antique jewelry offer her comfort, but she now has a surveillance system hooked up just in case.

“I’d just like him to say he’s sorry.”

The would-be robber got away with absolutely nothing from her store and Sotiriou says it should be his lesson to give up his apparently short life of crime.

Police haven’t released the suspect’s identity.