Winter has bred a new kind of criminal in Brownstone Brooklyn — roving packs of teens so cold-blooded they’ll attack a pregnant woman and laugh about it.
Just ask Eve Hobgood — a 33-year-old mom who was attacked by a teen wolf pack on Jan. 25 at around 5:30 pm as she was walking home.
Hobgood initially noticed the group of 10 on Dean Street between Hoyt and Bond streets throwing snowballs at passersby.
“I never thought they’d attack me,” confessed the North Carolina native.
When she passed, the crew taunted her with a slang term for female genitalia — then punctuated the vitriol by pelting her with snow and ice.
She turned around to inform the dopey dectet that she was three-months pregnant, thinking that might curb their obnoxious behavior. Wrong.
“One of them laughed and mimicked me, pushed me, and threw a massive chunk of ice in my face,” she recalled.
The incident has rattled her so much that she’s thinking of leaving the borough — for good.
“If something like this happens again, I’ll probably move out,” she said. “I don’t need to deal with punk kids. This is not normal teen behavior — it’s a mess.”
Hobgood filed a complaint with the 84th Precinct, but she said the precinct lost her report.
Deputy Inspector Mark DiPaolo, the precinct’s commander, said he could not comment about the specific report because he did not see it.
But he did say that he has deployed more cops on the beat throughout the precinct, which encompasses Boerum Hill, Vinegar Hill, DUMBO and Brooklyn Heights.
“We are out there,” he said.
But area leaders remain on heightened alert.
“I think everyone enjoys the decrease in crime no matter where they live, but these things hearken to a day when people felt much less safe,” said Howard Kolins, president of the Boerum Hill Association.
And the incident does not appear isolated:
• Leslie Lewis, the president of the 84th Precinct Community Council, said he witnessed a near- attack on Wyckoff Street in Boerum Hill just days before the Hobgood incident.
“A pack of teens ran down my block chasing another teen all the way to his house,” he said. “They were about to rob him,” said Lewis, who yelled before the posse scattered.
“They were wilding,” Lewis said, using the term coined in the 1980s for roving bands of marauding teens.
• A group of four thugs surrounded a 40-year-old man on Hoyt Street near Butler Street on Jan. 30, pelting him with snowballs and then robbing him.
• The same day as Hobgood’s attack, Karen Zebulon, the owner of the children’s store Gumbo on Atlantic Avenue, said that she saw the crew standing on the corner near her store and throwing snowballs at people and cars.
“I waited on the other side of the street — I didn’t want to be in the midst of all that, it was pretty disturbing.”
• Even our street-smart reporter Andy Campbell was victimized on Warren Street in Cobble Hill on his way to cover an important story on Monday night. Campbell was railroaded by a pack of young thugs, rudely driven into the snow, and unceremoniously given a frosty facial. Undeterred, he covered the meeting without additional suffering (save the lengthy meeting).
