61 East Third Street (Photo: Erica Martin)
Pro tip: if you’re walking home from the bar and a white, four-door sedan offers you a ride, do not get in. The driver may be brandishing a gun.
A group of three young women and one man may be targeting young women walking alone late at night, a police spokesperson source said.
On June 30, around 4am near 61 East Third Street, an approximately 20-year-old woman tapped a 26-year-old woman on the shoulder and demanded her wallet, according to a police report. The alleged robber, who wore a green baseball cap and tank top, told the victim there was a man with a gun in a car across the street and the victim promptly handed over her credit cards and cell phone (the robber was nice enough to let her keep her ID)
About an hour later and a block away, near 21 Second Avenue, an intoxicated 24-year-old woman was walking down the street when she saw what she thought was a livery cab, the police spokesperson said. In addition to the dark-skinned male driver, the victim reported that the car contained three black female passengers. She got in and asked them to take her uptown.
While the driver headed toward the woman’s destination, one of the passengers went through her purse, taking her iPhone, debit and credit cards, and MetroCard. The victim reported that the driver was carrying a gun, and that the group eventually dropped her off around Midtown, again leaving her with her I.D.
The incidents are part of a pattern of six robberies, the most recent of which, on July 3, began around midnight with an incident in Forest Hills, Queens. Later that evening the perpetrators hit up a second victim near SoHo before their final robbery of the night around 3 a.m. in Gramercy Park.
Credit cards lifted from one of the victims in the East Village were used at a gas station on Queens Boulevard, a police source said. That, plus the fact that the July 3 robberies started in the 102nd Precinct, in Queens, led the police to conclude that the perpetrators probably live in the Forest Hills/Rego Park area.
Victims described the white, four-door sedan in four of the six robberies, the police source said. Five of the six victims were women in their 20s.