Thieves Target Subway Newspaper Stand Workers In Brooklyn: Cops

BROOKLYN, NY — A group of men in Brooklyn have been beating up and robbing newspaper stand workers in the borough's subway stations, police said.

The group of four men are wanted on robbery charges for two separate muggings this month.

In the first, the group forced themselves behind the counter of a newspaper stand at the Atlantic Avenue station near the 2 line just before midnight on Dec. 16, police said. One of the men took out a knife and demanded the 49-year-old stand worker hand over his property. The group started punching the man before taking cash from the register and running away, police said.

Less than a week later, the same group of men went behind the counter of a newspaper stand at Borough Hall station near the 2 line around 7 p.m. on Dec. 22. The group began to punch the 53-year-old stand worker's head and body before grabbing cash from the register and running away, police said.

Both workers had bruising from the assaults but refused medical attention from emergency responders, police said. It is unknown how much cash the men took from both their registers.

Police said the men are all between 20 and 30 years old and they were all last seen wearing all dark clothing. Police released photos of the men that were taken on surveillance video before the Borough Hall robbery.

The robberies came just days before Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams spoke out about violence on the city's subways and called for more safety measures to be put in.

Adams — pointing to a shooting at the Seventh and Flatbush avenues station in Park Slope and a fight at a station in Manhattan that also happened over the weekend — said that cameras outside the stations, bystander intervention training and body cameras for 500 transit new cops are needed to stop a rise in subway crimes.

Anyone with information in regard to the identity of these individuals is asked to call the NYPD's Crime Stoppers Hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477) or for Spanish, 1-888-57-PISTA (74782). The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the CrimeStoppers website at WWW.NYPDCRIMESTOPPERS.COM or on Twitter @NYPDTips. All calls are kept strictly confidential.