Police say they’ve collared a second sex fiend in the spree of attacks that have terrorized a large swath of Brooklyn since March — but they’ve only linked the suspect to one incident.
Cops nabbed Joshua Flecha, a 32-year-old from Queens, on Monday at about 3:15 am after they found him masturbating between parked cars on 17th Street near 10th Avenue.
On Tuesday, detectives put Flecha through lineups to see if he was connected to 19 other assaults across Park Slope, Sunset Park, Bay Ridge and Windsor Terrace.
This is the second arrest in the broad-ranging gropings and attempted rapes — for which there are six police sketches.
“He’s been picked out of one lineup, but this is a 20-incident pattern,” a police source said. “We’re going to conduct as many lineups as we can, but he may only be implicated in one incident.”
Cops say that they saw Flecha at 2:30 am on Greenwood Avenue near E. Fourth Street in Windsor Terrace and again 45 minutes later, loitering near a line of parked cars. When they got out of their squad car, they found him with his pants unzipped watching porn on his cellphone.
They also found him in possession of marijuana, cops said.
Officers cuffed Flecha and took him to the Brooklyn Special Victims Squad because he resembled a police sketch for one of the six subway attacks that were only recently added to the pattern.
Flecha was later picked out of a lineup and connected to a May 7 incident where a man grabbed a woman’s breasts, exposed himself and masturbated in the entrance to the Seventh Avenue F train station, cops said.
It’s the second arrest linked to the so-called South Slope Sex Fiend.
Last week, police cuffed Adolfo Martinez, a 26-year-old fish-market worker, for an alleged buttock grope on 39th Street near Fourth Avenue.
Martinez fits the description of most of the South Slope fiends: He is short, Hispanic and in his 20s. Flecha fits the description to the extent that he’s Hispanic.
His only other arrest was for drunk driving in Long Island in 2009.
For the past year, Flecha has worked as a bartender at the Heartland Brewery in Midtown Manhattan, where a co-worker described him as a “great guy.”
“I am 100 percent sure that’s he’s innocent,” he said.
Anyone with information on the fiends is asked to call Crime Stoppers at (800) 577–8477.
