I pulled this from my own thread about bizaar things…
New York Daily News
Sunday, December 22, 2002; Page A20
NEW YORK, Dec. 21 – On a desolate fringe of a Queens, N.Y., park, a gang of homeless men set upon a woman and dragged her into their squalid encampment, raping her for two hours while police began a frantic search. The 42-year-old victim finally was rescued when a police dog picked up her scent, tracked her to the hobo jungle and sank his teeth into one of the men who brutalized her, authorities said.
“It is a horrendous crime,” Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said as the five assailants were booked on kidnapping, robbery, rape and sodomy charges.
The attack occurred at 10 p.m. Thursday at Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, on a deserted pedestrian path linking Shea Stadium and the National Tennis Center.
Sitting on a bench, the woman and a male friend were jumped by a band of homeless men who beat and robbed them.
The mob then grabbed the woman and pulled her down a flight of stairs to a Long Island Rail Road platform, across the tracks and deep into the woods.
Amid the thick brush, the men had put up several shacks patched together from wood, cardboard and plastic – described by one investigator as human “bird’s nests.”
The huts were filled with old mattresses and piles of garbage. They were so filthy that one policeman said he planned to throw out his shoes after stepping inside.
In one of the ramshackle shelters – impossible to see from even a short distance – the men took turns beating and raping the woman.
Her friend had raced off, found a passerby with a cell phone and called police, who quickly swarmed the park.
For two hours, police searched the sprawling grounds with dogs for a trace of the woman and her captors.
As police closed in, two of the suspects, Victor Cruz, 22, and Jose Hernandez, 18, ran out of the woods and were captured.
A 10-year-old German shepherd named Sean and his handler, Officer Kim Flechaus, were the first to reach the shack where the victim was held.
“It was awful. We couldn’t find her, and then the dog went nuts,” one investigator said.
The bloodied woman, naked from the waist down, apparently heard the cops and bolted. She told them one of her attackers was still inside.
The dog was sent in, and he ripped into suspect Louis Carmona, 20, authorities said. After a brief standoff, the dog then pulled Carlos Rodriguez, 22, and Jesus Torres, 28, from a second shanty nearby.
Three of the five suspects were treated at the hospital for dog bites.
When they were led out of the 110th Precinct stationhouse Friday night, they wore only hospital gowns because their clothes were seized for evidence. Shivering, they tried to cover their faces as they walked past.
The viciousness of the assault recalled the 1989 rape of a jogger in Central Park, which ended with the convictions of five teenagers being tossed out Thursday. Convicted rapist and killer Matias Reyes confessed to the crime.
“This is eerily similar to the whole Central Park thing,” an NYPD source said. “Everyone is crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s to make sure history does not repeat itself.”
The gang rape also bore similarities to a group attack on a Brooklyn woman last month in Lincoln Terrace Park in Crown Heights. Those assailants are still at large.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
