FORT GREENE — A pair of teen mugging suspects who snapped a selfie with a victim's cellphone have confessed to pulling off 10 other robberies in Fort Greene Park — part of a spike in stickups there, police sources said.
Tyquan Solomon, 19, and Terrance Sistrunk, 16, were charged earlier this month with stealing $205 and an iPhone from a 22-year-old man in the park on Feb. 2, police said.
"We caught a tremendous break," said Deputy Inspector Scott Henderson, commanding officer of the 88th Precinct. "We knocked off 10 robberies with these two individuals. Hopefully their arrest will impact robberies in the area."
The suspects — who police identified from a selfie on a stolen phone — told police that they walked around Fort Greene Park looking for people who weren't paying attention and then approached them from behind, snatching their phones and other belongings.
Both teens were initially charged with five counts of robbery. Solomon was being held in lieu of $25,000 cash or $50,000 bond, and Sistrunk, who has no prior arrests, was held on $50,000 cash and $100,000 bond.
Police are looking for more suspects that might be connected to a recent spike in robberies in and around the park.
Robbery in the precinct as a whole is up 10 percent through Feb. 9, from 28 to 31, according to NYPD data. But it was not clear how many of those incidents occurred in the park.
"There's a crew of individuals that are hiding in the park and accosting people," Henderson said. "We have two, but there may be a few more out there."
Henderson noted that the other individuals are hard to identify because they wear ski masks and approach their victims from behind.
"We still can't get a good idea of what the others look like," he said.
If anyone believes that they were the victim of a similar crime in this area they are asked to call the NYPD's Crime Stoppers Hotline at 800-577-TIPS.
