April 1, 2009

Getting Mugged in Park Slope

I mentioned this incident on one of the threads, and promised to tell the whole story – so here it is:

My wife and I had just finished dinner at a friend’s place on 1st and 8th, and were on our way back to our home on 7th and Garfield, just two blocks away. We were pretty buzzed up – definitely not doing the “don’t-F-with-me” walk that we’ve all perfected, just strolling home in our safe neighborhood. Well, we were walking down the hill on Garfield when two young guys came along in the other direction, one sort of hanging on the other one, just monkeying around, maybe telling a joke. We didn’t pay any attention to them. They just looked like regular kids, maybe about 20 years old. My wife has been in Brooklyn since she was six, and I’ve been in NYC for 11 years, and we’ve trained our selves that even if you are scared of scary looking people, you probably do worse for yourself by showing it. So there was every reason to ignore them like you ignore everyone else on the sidewalk.
Right when they were passing us, one of them just said something like “what’s up”, and I turned around to see him standing about a stride away, pointing a gun at me – he didn’t have a very aggressive look on his face – more like a raised-eyebrow look, as if to say, “clearly, I’m the one who gets the money in this situation, so do what you need to do”
I’m not totally clear what was going on with my wife. She ran up the hill a few strides, and ended up wrestling with the other guy for her bag and screaming. I was obviously powerless to help, and I just focused on making the thing end as soon as possible. I figured that all they wanted to do was run to the park with our stuff, and the guy didn’t really look like he was going to shoot us.
So I told the guy “I guess you’re gonna need this”, and handed over my wallet, and then started shouting at my wife to give up her bag, which she did…but only after I shouted three times. I was mostly worried that the guy was going to slug her to get her to shut up, but luckily, she did on her own and the guys took off up the hill.
We dusted ourselves off, and looked up to see someone in the second story window of a brownstone right above us, and we yelled to him to call 911. Oddly, (there is always at least one totally surreal thing in this kind of story) the guy just stood there staring at us, like he was watching TV. We had to yell at him three or four times to call before he finally disappeared into his apartment.
Then we walked about halfway down the block, and wouldn’t you know it, a police cruiser was right there. We ran up to it, and the cop had her radio out before we even got to the door (they’re trained to look for freaked-out people running at them). She goes, “get in”, and blasts out our description of the two guys, pops a u-turn, and starts flying up Garfield, asking us for any other details we could remember. In less then a minute, we had already passed a few other cruisers swarming around looking for these guys. Within about two minutes, they had a guy with his hands on a wall, surrounded by about 10 police officers on foot. One of the cops had my wallet, and asked me to identify it, which I did.
We actually refused to ID the guy, which disappointed the cops a little. The reason was that – well, they say in that situation, the victims usually do a great job identifying the gun, because that’s what they are looking at the whole time. That is spot on. When the cops took us to the bushes where they found a gun, I had no problem identifying it. I do have to say there was some pressure to ID the guy, and we just couldn’t be 100% sure and didn’t want to guess. A lot of people would match the description we gave, and we didn’t want any innocent people to get locked up.
As it turned out, they arrested they guy on the following: 1) he matched our basic description, 2) they found my wallet and the gun within a couple of blocks of him, 3) he couldn’t explain why he was in the neighborhood, 4) someone of the same description had run from another cruiser just a minute or so earlier, and 5) his heart was racing. When pressed, he said he had been jogging, and he was wearing street clothes.
The cops took us back to the station, where they took every last detail of our story and again asked us to try to ID the “perp”. Again we refused, and we refused to look at mug shots, because we are aware of what it can do to a victim’s memory when one of the mugshots matches the suspect. We were there until about 3:30, and they drove us home. Aside from a little bit of pressure to get a positive id on their perp, they were totally professional, and really nice to us. They offered us coffee, drove us home, and answered all of our questions, even the ones unrelated to the case (how common is this, is crime increasing, etc.)
Here are a few take-aways: This crime was not that common, and busting one was a pretty good score for the precinct (honestly I have to say it was very impressive how fast they acted, and they deserve major kudos). The gun was a loaded semi-automatic with five rounds in it, so if you think guys are doing this with fake guns, it’s not wise to gamble on it. The crime that they see a lot of in the area that you might not expect is burglary, right in the middle of the day while people are at work. And (maybe this is common sense to some): The blocks close to the park are an ideal place to mug someone, because the mugger can run into the park – so at the margin, 6th ave is safer than 8th.
The following Saturday, two of the cops involved came and served us with subpoenas, just basically requiring us to come and give our story in court. Even though we didn’t visually ID the “perps”, we did press charges Thursday night on the logic that if the cops had enough evidence for the case to stand up on its own, we felt a duty to get a criminal off the streets. It turned out to be the right move, because as we found out Saturday, the guy confessed to the whole thing, and even turned in his friend. He was 19, and from Jamaica (explaining his economy of words during the incident). His friend was 16, from Brooklyn, and endowed with the good sense to deny being anywhere near the crime scene.
So, long story short, the 16 year old is back in high school, and the 19 year old broke down and confessed again to the ADA in Brooklyn Superior Court. We were there the following Wednesday to give a recorded statement in front of a grand jury, in case the plea bargain fell through. The charge was first degree armed robbery, which carries a mandatory minimum of five years for the first offense. He was overstaying his visa, and he’ll probably bargain for two years and deportation. Notably, the DA’s paperwork indicated that we had visually identified the suspect, and when we corrected it we were given a lecture about how a lot of people flake out under pressure and change their story. So we had to insist again that we could not ID the guy, and never did, and the ADA had to change the case to base it on the confession instead of the ID. To me, the scary lesson in that was that a visual ID would have been very powerful evidence, powerful enough so that they were not even going to need the confession to move the case on (I think that’s the “indictment”). Of course you hope that a good lawyer would hack away at our ID, but you never know. We’ve all seen “dateline” type shows about wrongful convictions, but it was really shocking to realize first hand how easy it would have been to send an innocent person to jail if we had wanted to.
Anyway, we’re ok, and we’re over it, other than being just a little more spooked by random people lurking around the park.

Posted by joe_the_bummer at 1:11 PM | Comments (64)
Categories: Quality of Life

Comments