Police on Monday towed about two dozen scooters away from a shelter in Queens where a suspect in a fatal police shooting lived, sources said, shortly after The Washington Post reported on the moped threat.
NYPD officers converged on the converted hotel in East Elmhurst where Venezuelan national Bernardo Raul Castro Mata was living before he shot and wounded two NYPD officers Monday morning. Many of the illegal bikes remain out of public view and beyond police reach, The Washington Post has learned.
Many of the often illegal scooters are stored in hidden areas of countless migrant shelters across the five boroughs, including behind a giant fence at the former Creedmoor psychiatric hospital in Queens, where hundreds of asylum seekers now live.
“We can’t ticket these vehicles,” an off-duty city traffic officer said Monday. “We can’t even check them. It’s a problem. Once they’re parked or stored on private property, it becomes a huge hassle.”
“The shelter protects them from us,” the traffic director said.
The Post reported in a front-page story that the NYPD is fighting back against an unprecedented surge in the number of scooters and mopeds used as getaways for serious crimes — a trend that coincides with thousands of immigrants flocking to the city.
Of the seven most serious crimes, 790 have involved scooters, mopeds and motorcycles so far this year, compared with just 156 for the same period in 2022, according to NYPD statistics.
Last week, officers took to the streets, seizing 39 offending motorcycles and issuing summonses.
Scooters have become a menace on New York’s streets, with hundreds of immigrants now using them to do shady food delivery jobs and some for more sinister enterprises.
Venezuela’s notorious Tren de Aragua gang has a “coordinator” in New York City who recruits immigrant criminals, gives them instructions and provides the means to carry out violent robberies, sources said.
The revelations were allegedly drawn from a hospital bedside interview with Bernardo Raul Castro Mata, a 19-year-old Venezuelan gangster who is facing attempted murder charges for the June 3 shooting deaths of two police officers.
The New York Police Department launched another effort against the moped menace at an East Elmhurst shelter on Monday, officials said, despite ongoing challenges to the citywide crackdown.
A migrant shelter in Long Island City had 23 scooters parked on the street and guarded by security guards, but security guards said officers never showed up to inspect and seize the vehicles.
In Creedmoor, an 8-foot-tall fence surrounds a former psychiatric hospital, helping to hide the hordes of scooters that frequently come and go from the grounds.
“It’s too noisy,” said a mother who lives opposite the facility. “It scares my children. I’m scared on the streets too, especially when I’m with my children, and all of a sudden there’s this loud bang! noise.”
A teacher at nearby PS 18 Winchester Elementary School called the vehicles “unpredictable.”
“Kids are not happy about the scooters,” she said. “I think they’re mainly just scared of the noise they make.”
New York Police Department and City Hall officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
