Cops in riot gear converged on 13th and Ovington avenues last week in a high-stakes search for a former Dyker Heights resident responsible for a terrifying night time break-in.
After a 10-day investigation, detectives from the 68th Precinct identified Edwin Morales as the man who held up a 25-year-old woman at gunpoint after sneaking through her bedroom window.
The woman told police that she was sleeping soundly at 3:30 a.m. on July 6 when Morales scaled up the building fire escape and crept through the window, which was either left unlocked or opened.
Morales woke the woman and stuck a gun in her face, ordering her to hand over her valuables.
He took the woman’s chain, a Tiffany bracelet and a laptop computer, which he put in a pillow case he threw over his shoulder, as if he was some kind of sinister Santa Claus, officials allege. He also took the victim’s Blackberry so she couldn’t call for help.
As he crept back out the window, he threatened to shoot the woman if she left the bedroom, prosecutors were told.
Sources said that once Morales was identified as the thief, they tracked him to Bensonhurst.
But Morales had already left the area and was headed back to Dyker Heights, where his ex-wife and children live.
Learning that he was holed up in an apartment and that he was possibly armed and dangerous, members of the NYPD Emergency Services Unit swooped in and conducted a search of the apartment building, pulling tenants out as they went from place to place.
Morales was taken into custody without incident, save for a brief encounter with a dog that ended up tasered, police said.
Prosecutors charged Morales with menacing, criminal trespass, burglary, petit larceny, grand larceny and robbery.
Officials said that they are currently trying to tie Morales to other area crimes, such as the brutal, and still unsolved, home invasion on 13th Avenue near 65th Street that left a 69-year-old woman seriously injured.
