When the elevator reached her floor, the girl screamed, but it was too late: the sexual assault had been committed, and the attacker escaped.
New York City’s 3,330 elevators in Housing Authority projects have become all-too-frequent crime scenes, confined enclosures that often leave tenants at the mercy of violent criminals.
Everyone knows about the dark alley, the foreboding path where trouble can lurk behind every shadow. But in New York, housing project elevators tend to be far more dangerous places, neither dark nor unfamiliar to those who live there.
Irma Mendez, who lives in the Wagner Houses in Harlem, said her 22-year-old son was robbed at gunpoint in an elevator last year; the robber, who lived in the same complex, but one building over, stole his cellphone and jacket, Ms. Mendez said.
In the Bushwick Houses in Brooklyn, a 23-year-old woman who would give only her nickname, Yamillie, said she had been jumped by a group of drunken young men three years ago while she and her boyfriend were in an elevator waiting for the doors to close. They threw beer bottles, breaking her glasses, and took her wallet and her boyfriend’s jacket.
“If I could take the stairs, I would,” said Yamillie, who lives on the 17th floor.
The police said they do not keep statistics on crimes that occur in elevators. But police officials acknowledged that on a square-foot basis, a disproportionate amount of crime occurs within them.
In recent years, Chief Joanne Jaffe, who commands the police officers in housing units, began compiling videos of crimes caught on Housing Authority cameras. One of the resulting videos, titled “Montage No. 3,” offers a range of brutal acts committed in elevators: passengers are stabbed, women are sexually assaulted, girlfriends are struck, dogs are kicked, strangers are robbed.
Chief Jaffe said the videos were intended to keep the police commissioner apprised of crime conditions in public housing, but also were used to train officers on how criminals stalked their prey.
In one video clip, taken from the Wagner Houses in East Harlem, a man wearing a striped shirt, jean shorts and a Yankees cap is on the hunt for a victim. He ventures into the stairwell, and lumbers up a flight of stairs. Finding no one, he returns to the lobby and takes up a post in the elevator.
As the doors begin to shut, someone approaches. He thrusts his arm out, and for a freeze-framed second, the gesture might have passed for courtesy: a man holding an elevator door open for a young woman. When the doors closed, the man, Marquis Phillips, began to sexually assault her, a crime for which he was sentenced a year ago to a term of 78 years to life in prison.
“When I watch this,” Chief Jaffe said, “I think, ‘How can people live with this amount of fear, just entering into their building?’”
Peter Cestare, a former supervisor in the Housing Authority police force, before it merged with the New York Police Department, noted that with the passing years, elevators have remained particularly crime-prone even as the urban streetscape has become safer, a result of improved street lighting, ubiquitous security cameras and the advent of cellphones, which have all made it easier for the authorities to identify and catch muggers.
In elevators, on the other hand, Mr. Cestare, who commanded the elevator vandalism squad in the late 1970s, said: “You’ve got your victim contained in a box. As the bad guy, you’ve got complete control over the situation, and that’s really what you want if you prey on people.”
Eight days after the 13-year-old girl was assaulted this past August, a man was robbed at gunpoint as he exited an elevator inside the O’Dwyer Gardens Houses in Coney Island. And in July, a man wearing a floppy white hat brandished a gun and took the pet parrot of a woman as she exited an elevator in the Morris Houses in the Bronx.
The potential for crime is something that many Housing Authority tenants are keenly aware of, helping them overlook problems normally associated with elevators: erratic stops, doors that close on fingers or feet, chronic breakdowns. Tanya Lopez, a 29-year-old mother of two, said she was always mindful about who might be riding alongside her in the elevators in the Sheepshead Bay Houses in South Brooklyn. If a man she does not recognize is also waiting for an elevator in the lobby of her building, Ms. Lopez said, “I just stay back and let them go.”
“I won’t go up with them,” she added, noting that she has been especially careful since a man in a neighboring building in her housing complex was shot to death inside an elevator last year.
To be sure, elevator crime is not limited to public housing developments. Perhaps the most disturbing and premeditated violence to unfold in an elevator in recent memory occurred in an apartment building in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn: a man wearing a surgical mask and white gloves, and armed with a tank of fuel and barbecue lighter, set on fire a 73-year-old woman in the cab of an elevator. The man, Jerome Isaac, had waited on her landing and attacked her as she opened the elevator door; she was burned to death.
When a homeless man was arrested for a pattern of elevator robberies east of Union Square in December, he explained his modus operandi to a detective: “I just randomly picked the buildings,” the man, Freddie Keitt, said. “I went in them to rob someone. Someone let me in the door. I waited in the lobby and robbed the first person who entered.”
Nor is the phenomenon especially new. In 1974, a career robber, Arthur Williams, was nicknamed the elevator bandit in newspaper articles for dozens of elevator holdups in Manhattan, including one in which he wore a green doorman’s uniform, greeting residents before robbing them in the elevator. In 1981, another man earned the same sobriquet for a series of elevator robberies of women in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Mr. Cestare, who is now a police lieutenant in South Carolina, acknowledged that many elevators now have surveillance cameras, but pointed out that suspects could easily use a hoodie or ball cap as a shield.
Indeed, in those three recent crimes in Housing Authority elevators, all since late July, suspects were all wearing caps or hats.
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