A teen who allegedly robbed a woman on Fifth Street near Prospect Park was chased down and collared on Jan. 6, but his accomplice got away.
The two hooligans took their victim’s purse as she headed towards Prospect Park West around 10:30 pm. Once they got possession of her pocketbook they fled into the park.
Twenty minutes later — with the help of the startled victim — cops nabbed their suspect inside the park near Fifth Street. His accomplice was not found.
Hours later, the victim posted her horrifying story on the Web site, “Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn.”
“I had passed these two kids when I was walking home from the 2 subway at Grand Army Plaza,” she wrote. “They must have doubled back, and followed me … but since there were plenty of people around, I felt OK.”
That feeling of relative safety changed abruptly when she noticed that the “kids” were following her.
“All I could think of was I needed to get to my door as soon as possible,” she wrote. “I took my keys and my cellphone out of my bag. They came up on my stoop, I heard them and turned around, and then they backed me up against my door, pulled my coat, telling me to give them the bag.
“All I could think of was that they were going to drag me somewhere. The smaller of the two grabbed my bag, and they both ran into the park. I started screaming for people to help me. My downstairs neighbor and one of my other neighbors ran into the park after them, and a bunch of other people came out. My roommate and this other woman called the cops [who] came right away. They asked me to get in the car, and we were going to drive into the park to see if I could identify them if found.”
Thanks to the woman’s help, cops did end up nabbing one of the thugs.
“The cops … asked me if that was one of them, I looked at his face, and immediately knew it was him,” she said. “He denied it, of course, but the cop told me that when they got him, he had obviously been running [and] was pretty winded. It was pretty satisfying knowing that I could identify him, say, ‘Yes, that’s one of them,’ and that hopefully he’ll be put away.”
But the arrest offered little consolation to the victim, who lost a camera and credit and debit cards in the attack. “Although they didn’t hurt me, I still feel violated,” she said. “Although they got one of them, I’m still scared.”
There has been a spate of muggings around Prospect Park in the past few weeks, but last week’s victim is cooperating with authorities and urging neighbors to do the same.
“Hopefully, these two are the ones who have been mugging other woman in the neighborhood and that there aren’t more of them out there,” she said. “If this has happened to you recently, you should call the officer on your case, and tell them that you heard that someone had been arrested for a similar crime.”
