New York City police have arrested a fifth teenager in the playground rape of an 18-year-old woman in Brooklyn last week, officials said on Tuesday, as the debate continued about whether authorities properly responded to the attack.
An NYPD spokeswoman said that the 17-year-old who was in custody Tuesday would likely be charged, joining four other teenagers facing charges for the 7 January rape of the woman, whose name is being withheld by authorities, as is usual in rape cases.
Denzel Murray, 14, Shaquell Cooper, 15, Ethan Phillip, 15, and Onandi Brown, 17, are scheduled to be arraigned on first-degree rape charges in Brooklyn criminal court on Tuesday, according to law enforcement officials. The fifth suspect has been identified as Travis Beckford.
According to police, the five teenagers approached the woman and her father around 9pm at the Osborne playground. One of them pointed a gun at the pair and demanded the father leave the area, police say.
At least one of the suspects raped the victim, while she was forced to perform oral sex on two others, the woman told police, according to the New York Times.
Though the father, who some reports said had difficulty getting hold of a phone to call 911, eventually found a patrol car, the group of young men had already fled by the time he returned to the scene with police.
Police say the victim’s father told them he was drinking in the park with his daughter before the incident happened. NYPD chief of detectives Robert Boyce said on Tuesday at a news conference that allegations of sexual contact between the father and daughter in the park before the incident had come from two of the suspects currently in custody.
“That came from two individuals who were arrested and that’s the only place we’ve got that from so far,” Boyce said. He said the department had not currently requested a DNA sample from the father.
Elected officials in New York, one of whom called the attack “an all-time moral low”, have criticized the police for not releasing information about it quickly enough, noting that a video of the suspects was not released until Saturday, two days after the incident took place.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said he had only been told of the crime on Sunday morning.
“This was a horrific crime and an unusual crime and I should have been informed more quickly,” he told reporters, flanked by police commissioner Bill Bratton and other law enforcement officials at an unrelated news conference. “The process of informing the public and the community should have been clearer and earlier.”
The police department pushed back on claims that its response to the crime had been in any way slow and highlighted the swift arrest of the suspects, but officials admitted the department’s communications did fall short.
“The information we would have put out to the public initially would have been extraordinarily limited,” Bratton said. “At the same time ... there’s no getting around the fact that on this issue we did not put the information out quickly.”
Brooklyn councilwoman Inez Barron, whose district includes the Osborne playground, said she believed there would have been quicker response to a similar incident in a more affluent neighborhood.
She said that she normally received a text from the local police precinct about major crimes that occurred in her district, but said she had yet to receive information from the police about the rape.
“We haven’t heard anything further than what’s been reported in the papers,” she told the Guardian. “And that’s troubling.”
Reported rapes increased 6% in New York City in 2015, according to recent police statistics.
