Muggings in Elevators on the Rise

A violent trend has emerged in New York City and across the Five Boroughs. Muggers and sexual assaulters have begun to seek potential victims in their buildings’ elevators, turning people’s own apartments into potentially fatal criminal hotspots. While these criminals used to be relegated to poorly lit areas such as alleyways and sideroads, the elevator provides a closed space and an understandably terrified victim with nowhere to run. This past August, a 13 year old girl was viciously raped by a man who had followed her into the elevator of her building in the South Jamaica houses in Queens, and the man escaped. He has since remained at large, free to terrorize others due to the difficulty of catching a criminal who commits his crimes in an elevator.