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Brooklyn Teen Arrested In Random Blowgun Dart Sniper Attacks
By
John Del Signore
Published May 22, 2012
Modified May 22, 2012
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By
John Del Signore
Published May 22, 2012
Modified May 22, 2012
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Teenagers: When they're not lobbing bricks at cyclists or jumping onto subway tracks to play chicken with oncoming trains, they're firing freaking darts at pedestrians with blowguns. Yesterday residents of Bensonhurst and Bath Beach were on edge after several pedestrians were hit with three-inch long darts. Now police say they've caught one of the culprits, who allegedly fired the darts at random passers-by from an apartment window.
“I felt like someone was hunting,” victim Arkadiy Shklyaver, 52, tells the Post. He took a dart to the stomach while walking in Bensonhurst Sunday night. Another victim, Georgiy Ostrozhnyuk, 66, was hit in the stomach and leg a half hour earlier while sitting in an SUV with the windows open. "Yesterday was painful. Maybe in a scale from zero to 10, it's five, maybe," Ostrozhnyuk tells NY1. "The first time, I didn't feel the pain. Maybe five minutes, four minutes later, I started to feel pain."
(Ostrozhnyuk's wound, via NY1)
The three victims were treated at Coney Island Hospital and given medication to fight any possible infection. The darts were analyzed, and so far it appears they were non-poisonous. All the attacks took place near Bay 32nd Street and 86th Street, and yesterday police searched rooftops in the area and knocked on apartment doors. At one second floor residence, an unidentified 15-year-old teen "basically copped to it,” a police source tells the Post.
Investigators recovered darts from the apartment, but no blowgun—the teen allegedly told cops that his friend owned the weapon. (Police are still looking for his accomplice.) So far there's no explanation for why they shot the people, beyond the fact that they're teenagers. Meanwhile, the Daily News uses the occasion to look back at The Dart Man attacks of 1990!
Tagged
bath beach
bensonhurst
blowguns
brooklyn
darts
teenagers
John Del Signore
Originally from the Albany area, John Del Signore has called NYC home since 1995. In addition to his thousands of meticulously-crafted bespoke blog posts for Gothamist, his writing has also been published in The Awl, Deadspin, The Nervous Breakdown, and performed at The Brick Theater in Brooklyn.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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