A fifth teen was taken into custody in connection with the brutal gang rape of a 18-year-old girl at a Brooklyn playground on Thursday.
CNN reports the unidentified 17-year-old teenager was not officially arrested as of Tuesday morning.
He was taken into custody at Tilden High School as a person of interest in the case.
The 18-year-old rape victim and her father were drinking beer near the handball courts at Brownsville’s Osborn Playground when 5 teens approached.
According to the NY Post, one of the suspects told police the group interrupted the girl and her father having sex in the park.
“Can we have some of that?” one of the thugs reportedly asked the father. Two of the teens reportedly had consensual sex with the victim while her father, who was drunk, staggered away.
But the father remembers the encounter differently.
He told police one of the thugs pointed a gun at his face and ordered him to run.
“If I would have stood there and fought them (I would have died),” he later told WABC. “Because they meant business. They weren’t playing around.”
The father said he ran to a nearby bodega and begged a clerk to use the phone.
But the clerk told a reporter the father was “too drunk” and incoherent. “He wasn’t making sense,” said the clerk, who added he ordered the father to leave.
The parents of 2 of the suspects — ages 14 and 15 — turned them in to police on Sunday. Police arrested 2 other teens later that day.
The names of 4 the suspects are: Denzel Murray, 14; Shaquell Cooper, 15; Ethan Phillip, 15; and Onandi Brown, 17. All were charged with rape and other sex-related crimes. They will be tried as adults.
