Moped-riding robbery crews have terrorized New York City with more than 20 violent chain-snatchings since September, including an attack that left an NYPD detective fighting for his life after being stabbed 10 times.
Detective Jose Mercedes, 33, told reporters this week that he had identified himself repeatedly to his attackers in both English and Spanish before they set upon him near East 206th Street and Rochambeau Avenue in Norwood, the Bronx. The necklace they targeted had been a gift from his mother.
“They didn’t care,” Mercedes said of the two men police identified as D’Angelo Caraballo, 25, and Sneider Mejia, 24, both Dominican Republic natives living in the US illegally according to the Department of Homeland Security and ICE. The pair fled on an e-bike; Mercedes gave chase but collapsed from blood loss before police hunted them down outside Boston and returned them to face attempted murder charges.
The attack on Mercedes came eight days after another scooter robbery in Brownsville, Brooklyn, where an off-duty female officer, 25, had a gold necklace reading “Angie” worth about $800 ripped from her neck at Arlington and Barbey streets on October 10, police sources said.
Jorge Beltre, 30, a Bronx bodega worker and Uber driver, suffered his own encounter with the motorized muggers on October 8 near Mount Eden Parkway and Sheridan Avenue in Claremont. He was walking his 5-year-old son home from school when two scooter-riding bandits attacked. Beltre fought back to save his 14-karat gold Cuban-link chain, and one attacker pulled a knife and stabbed him in the leg.
With help from eight onlookers, the Dominican Republic native held the 17-year-old thief until police arrived. His son escaped unharmed, though Beltre later said the boy asked his mother to send him back to school with a baseball bat “so he could hit the criminals if he saw them.”
“The community and I caught one,” Beltre told The Post in Spanish. “Why did they let him go? He didn’t say where the other guy is. He didn’t say who the other guy was. I feel outraged. Why do they grant him release?”
The teenager was charged with robbery and weapon possession but released on $900 bail, which the Bronx District Attorney’s Office told Beltre. Beltre needed five stitches.
“It fills me with outrage because I felt my life was in danger,” he continued. “We are living through a scourge. The Bronx is practically being ravaged by these criminals. People are getting their chains snatched — two or three incidents a day. The community is fed up.”
A law enforcement officer, speaking anonymously because he was not cleared for media comment, said the reported figures represent merely a fraction of the actual crimes. “There are hundreds of chain snatchings around the city,” he said. “A lot of it has to do with the Trinitarios.”
The officer identified the violent street gang, founded by Dominican inmates at Rikers Island in the early 1990s, as driving the epidemic. “That’s one of their big things, chain snatchings, and two people on a bike doing robberies,” he explained.
Two reputed Trinitario members on scooters had already shot an off-duty federal border patrol agent, 42, at Fort Washington Park in Washington Heights on July 9, federal officials said. That attack sparked “Operation Salvo,” which took 54 crew members off the streets in January.
Other victims include a 54-year-old man dragged by an accelerating motorbike on Grand Avenue near West 180th Street on September 13 after refusing to release his $2,700 chain, and a 60-year-old man punched in the face at gunpoint near Duncan Street and Laconia Avenue on September 28 before losing $8,000 in jewelry.
An NYPD spokesperson noted that chain-snatchings had decreased in the Bronx since Mercedes’s stabbing. “Since the attempted murder of Detective Mercedes, there has been a significant decrease in chain snatches within the confines of Patrol Borough Bronx North,” the spokesperson said, adding that major crime had declined 7% citywide this year, with the Bronx showing a 12% reduction.
Yet critics fault the justice system’s handling of those arrested. An NYPD officer, also speaking anonymously, described a revolving door: “We’re not allowed to confer with ICE so we just arrest them. They get released on their own recognizance [by a judge] and they go back and do it again.”
Michael Alcazar, a former NYPD detective now teaching at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, pointed to enforcement gaps around e-bikes. “Mamdani doesn’t want to enforce summonses against these moped guys because they’re working, but then everyone’s taking advantage of it,” he said. “This is what they do in Third World countries.”
Alcazar advocated for broken-windows policing and the return of plainclothes anti-crime units disbanded in 2020 under former Mayor Bill de Blasio. “Bad guys have to know we’re enforcing these things,” he said. “That will nip this in the bud,” He added: “Nobody wants to talk about bringing back anti-crime but it’s an effective tool. This is what we did when crime was spiking.”
The Bronx District Attorney’s Office did not respond to a message seeking comment.