Capt. Terry O’Toole urges Maspeth residents to call 911 if they see anyone suspicious, to help fight a rash of nine recent burglaries in the area. Forum Newsgroup photo by Jeremiah Dobruck.
Police are combating a spike of at least nine burglaries in April within a few blocks of each other in Maspeth.
The burst of crimes happened in the area of Maspeth surrounded by the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, Long Island Expressway and Queens Boulevard.
Eight of the nine were concentrated between 51st and 47th avenues and between 61st and 66th streets.
Police say a suspect or group of suspects who knows the area is burgling houses, mostly in the afternoon.
Officers have blanketed the area, but were not been able to catch or identify a suspect despite a foot pursuit with one perpetrator.
Capt. Terry O’Toole, the 108th Precinct’s executive officer, said a police car was stationed at 50th Avenue and 65th Street as a burglary happened there at 3 p.m. one afternoon.
The occupant of the house was upstairs when she heard someone break into her home. She called a relative instead of 911, O’Toole said, delaying any chance of catching the perpetrator.
“We have deployed our officers all over the place to try to catch these guys,” O’Toole said. “What happens? The guys actually jumped over the fence, landed on the hood of the police car, got up and ran away.”
The officer and sergeant in the car chased the man through alleyways until he disappeared into an abandoned house.
“We did everything we were supposed to do and we couldn’t catch him,” O’Toole said.
O’Toole and the precinct brought in boroughwide taskforces and extra cops to blanket the area in an attempt to stop the pattern.
“We went full out with this,” O’Toole said. “I had bloodhounds come down from the Bronx.”
The evening of the burglary at 50th Avenue and 65th Street, police used that bloodhound to try to hunt down the suspect after he disappeared. Instead of finding him, they found he’d been all over the backyards and driveways of nearby houses.
“They tracked through all the backyards through all the houses in the entire neighborhood. That dog tracked for about four blocks,” O’Toole said. “That guy was all over the place. He was all over the place, and nobody reported him.”
As O’Toole told the story at the meeting of the civic group Communities of Maspeth and Elmhurst Together (COMET), he begged attendees to call 911 if they see anything suspicious.
He said the area is now crawling with officers too, with plainclothes deployments and help from the taskforce.
“And the scary thing is, all the suckers running around that we don’t know and nobody is calling 911 to report them as being suspicious. That’s what annoys me,” said COMET President Roe Daraio. “We have got to wake up here because they’re going to break into a house someday and somebody is going to be home.”
Police did recover stolen property during the chase, O’Toole said, meaning they now have fingerprints and DNA for at least one suspect.
Witnesses have given differing accounts, saying it’s either one perpetrator or three, but at least one should be known to police soon.
“With the fingerprints and the DNA we hope that we’ll have an identification in the next couple of weeks,” O’Toole said. “Hopefully we have this burglar got.”
By Jeremiah Dobruck
