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Woman in Wheelchair Gets Up and Shoves Bicyclist She Tried to Rob: Police

By Gustavo Solis | July 31, 2014 3:48pm
  The crook sat in a wheelchair before standing up and assaulting the Citi Bike rider, police said.
The crook sat in a wheelchair before standing up and assaulting the Citi Bike rider, police said.
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DNAinfo/Serena Solomon

CHELSEA — A cyclist was robbed and then beat up by a woman in a wheelchair, police said.

The 21-year-old victim was riding a Citi Bike along Eighth Avenue near 20th Street when she accidentally dropped her black Zara purse around 1:15 a.m. Saturday, according to the NYPD.

By the time she circled back, the bag was gone, police said. A witness told her that a woman in a wheelchair picked up the bag, according to the NYPD. The woman in the wheelchair had the designer purse on her lap and gave it back, police said.

The cyclist realized that her debit card was missing, and confronted the woman a second time, according to the NYPD. The woman in the wheelchair told a male accomplice standing next to him to get the debit card, which had been hidden in a nearby newspaper bin, police said.

Again, the woman noticed there was something missing from her purse — an iPhone 5S, according to police. She confronted the woman again and saw her phone charger sticking out of the wheelchair, police said. The crook grabbed the iPhone and threw it against the wall, breaking the screen, according to the an NYPD incident report.

About five minutes later, when the victim was heading home, she crossed paths with the woman in the wheelchair once again. The woman, who is 6-foot-1 and 200 pounds, stood up from the chair, shoved her against a metal grate, and got away on her motorized wheelchair, police said.

Other notable incidents that occurred recently in the 10th Precinct include:

 A woman wired $3,750 to a phony bank account in an apparent Craigslist apartment scam, police said.

The money was meant to be a “security deposit” for an apartment on West 14th Street and Seventh Avenue, police said. After wiring the money on July 23, the victim received multiple calls and emails asking for even more money, the NYPD said.

According to the incident complaint, the apartment does not exist. When the victim called her bank, they told her that the account she wired the money to is fraudulent, police said.