Brian Williams is facing additional questions as residents of his New Jersey hometown doubt the embattled anchor's claim that he was robbed in the late 1970s while selling Christmas trees from the back of a truck, the Asbury Park Press reported.

In interviews, the host of NBC's flagship "Nightly News" had asserted being held up at gunpoint as a teenager in Red Bank while selling the trees to help a church.

"A guy came up and stuck a .38-caliber pistol in my face and made me hand over all the money. Merry Christmas, right?" the 55-year-old told New Jersey Monthly magazine in 2008. "Of course, I suddenly appreciated the other jobs I thought I hated."

But such an incident would have been big news in the then-sleepy New Jersey town, a longtime borough restaurateur noted. So Danny's Steakhouse owner Daniel Murphy Jr., 71, thinks Williams' recollection lacks credibility.

"To be robbed in front of a church? Red Bank just wasn't like that," Murphy said. "It was the kind of town where as a kid I'd leave the house in the morning and not come back until 8, 9 o'clock at night -- and you never worried about safety."

If Williams had been robbed under the circumstances the anchor described, the story would have been detailed in the Register, a local newspaper that went out of business in the late 1980s, Murphy insisted. The restaurateur also questioned how Williams was able to identify the caliber of the gun with such specificity.

"Today I shoot, but when I was a teenager, if someone had pointed a gun at me, I wouldn't have known what kind of gun it was," he said.

Red Bank Police Chief Darren McConnell said it would be difficult to find any record of a 1970s armed robbery in the city without knowing the exact month and year the crime allegedly occurred.

Williams has been under fire ever since he admitted last week that he had not been aboard a helicopter hit and forced down by enemy fire during the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

It was a claim he had made repeatedly over several years, according to Stars and Stripes. Questions later also arose about the anchor's comments concerning his network's Hurricane Katrina coverage.

The "Nightly News" anchor and managing editor announced on Saturday that he was taking a temporary leave of absence, the Daily Mail noted. NBC News executives, meanwhile, are in the midst of "crisis talks" about Williams' future.

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