On Tuesday pregnant Rachel Massey was pushing her 14-month-old daughter in a stroller towards the McCarren Park's swings at 5 p.m. when she was robbed of her cell phone at gunpoint. A teenage boy pointed a black handgun inches from her chest. She wrote about the incident on a Brooklyn baby list serve. The public has been calling for a vastly increased police and park enforcement patrol presence in our park system after an explosion of crime recently a number of them occuring in McCarren Park. (Photos: Meredith Hoffman/DNAinfo)
Last Thursday another woman pushing a baby stroller was robbed of a cell phone in McCarren Park during the day.
Two weeks ago a homeless man was viciously attacked in the park. He has been unconscious since the incident according to the police.
That incident in the park occurred approximately a hundred yards away from where in July a 16-year-old was brutally attacked and nearly killed by large gang according to witnesses.
The teen was repeatedly stabbed and beaten.
Brooklyn
A pregnant woman was robbed at gunpoint as she took her 14-month-old daughter to a Williamsburg playground, police said, according to DNAinfo.
Rachel Massey was pushing her child in a stroller toward McCarren Park's swings at 5 p.m. Tuesday when a teenage boy pointed a black handgun inches from her chest.
"He said 'give me your phone' and I said 'I'm sorry?'" Massey told DNAinfo New York.
"I didn't even process it. "I think, 'Oh my God, what if he had just pulled the trigger?'"
Massey — who visits McCarren daily with her daughter, Olivia, and has lived in the neighborhood seven years — was in such shock that after handing the boy her iPhone on the park's edge at Lorimer Street, she started to sprint after him.
"I left Olivia with my sister and told her to call 911," said Massey, who is four months pregnant.
"I know cops would have told me to let the guy go... but in the moment I was on autopilot. Afterwards it really upset me."
The man, who she described as about 16 and wearing a black hooded top, was eventually cornered.
"A guy in the park chased him and stopped him in the tennis courts, and got him to give back the phone," Massey, 36, said.
But the robber then fled. Cops said they still have not made any arrests.
"It's disturbing, really unusual," said Deputy Inspector Terence Hurson, commanding officer of the 94th Precinct.
"It's unusual for us to take gunpoint robberies on the street."
Hurson said the Tuesday theft followed two armed robberies early Monday morning, just blocks from McCarren Park. Two men were robbed on Driggs Avenue by a pair of teenagers, one with a handgun, Hurson said.
At 12:20 a.m., a man was walking home on Driggs Avenue between Kingsland Avenue and Sutton Street when two teenage men approached him from the rear and took his phone and wallet after pointing a gun at him.
Then, at 12:30 a.m., on the corner of Driggs Avenue and Kingsland Avenue, the two suspects held another man at gunpoint and stole his iPhone and wallet, Hurson said.
"Certainly Monday night it was the same two guys," Hurson said.
Another gunpoint robbery blocks away Wednesday night led cops to arrest two suspects, who could be responsible for the incidents earlier this week, Hurson said.
Mamadou Ndiaye, 17, and Frederick Rivera, 18, are suspected of robbing a man — using an imitation pistol that appeared to be a black handgun — on Huron Street and Manhattan Avenue and stealing the man's cell phone, police said.
"We are looking into whether they are the two perpetrators from the Monday morning robberies and from the McCarren Park incident," Hurson said.
Hurson noted that yet another robbery occurred in McCarren Park Thursday during the day — and that once again it was a woman with a child.
The suspect — an unarmed man who was about 30 years old — rode up on his bike and "snatched a phone from a woman's hand who was pushing a baby stroller" on Driggs Avenue and Union Avenue, Hurson said.
He said police were still investigating if Massey's robber was involved in the earlier thefts.
"I want to wring his neck," said Massey.
"It's just unacceptable. I'm sure it will change the way people feel about coming to the park."
Read More:
Pregnant Mom Robbed at Gunpoint as She Took Daughter to McCarren Park
DNAinfo - October 19, 2012 - By Meredith Hoffman
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1010 WINS - October 19, 2012 - By Al Jones
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