The mom of an 11-year-old boy busted for robbing a subway rider blasted police, and media coverage of the alarming incident, saying her young son shouldn’t have been arrested.
“He’s an 11-year-old boy,” said the distressed mother. “They didn’t catch him doing anything.”
The boy was taken into custody around 10 p.m. Tuesday outside Midtown’s Roosevelt Hotel, a migrant shelter. Cops said they found the child after he and a 17-year-old friend took a man’s iPhone, which police tracked to the shelter, on a subway car approaching the Vernon Blvd.-Jackson Ave. stop on a Manhattan-bound 7 train. He was also connected to a Central Park robbery, according to police.
The mom, who chose not to give her name, gave birth to a baby girl less than a week ago — and spoke to the Daily News outside the shelter where she lives, clutching a stroller with the infant inside after returning from a hospital checkup.
“He had to go [to the police station] and wait for me. I just got out of the hospital. I just gave birth. Look, I have a five-day-old girl,” the mom said.
“He is a child, he is a child,” she lamented.
The distraught mom pushed back against reports that her son is in a gang.
“Why do they say he’s in Tren de Aragua — he’s not. He’s a child, I don’t understand.”
Police sources said they found the stolen phone and credit cards from a recent robbery in Central Park.
NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell called a recent crime surge in Central Park a “migrant robbery pattern.” The NYPD does not collect the nationality of suspects or perpetrators.
“That’s what we’re combating,” Chell said at a Midtown news conference on Wednesday. “We think they’re responsible for most of them, if not all.”
Chell said the suspects travel at night and in groups, scoping out victims on both sides of the park.
A juvenile report was filed and the child was returned to his mother, according to the NYPD.
Jesus Garcia, 30, a resident of the same migrant shelter, said he would see the child in the halls of the hotel on his way to school.
“She’s a single mother,” Garcia said. “No working papers, just had a baby… I have two kids. Can you imagine four kids running around, crying all the time? Imagine. It’s not her fault. It’s not the mother’s fault. You can’t keep kids inside at that age.”
The mother said she is looking for a lawyer.
