Two Phone Thefts — And Some Drama — Along B/Q Subway Line Yesterday

In two separate incidents, women were robbed of their phones yesterday along the B/Q subway line. One of the robberies led to a situation in which the thief was locked in a subway car with bewildered passengers.

A 65-year-old woman’s phone was snatched while she waited on the Manhattan-bound platform at the Cortelyou Road Q station at 12:03pm yesterday, police said. The thief was described as a black male, who then fled the station.

Less than an hour later, another woman had her phone stolen while on a Q train heading toward Manhattan. The robbery occurred after the train pulled into the Prospect Park station and the doors opened.

A young man grabbed the 38-year-old woman’s iPhone out of her hands just as the doors were about to close. The woman, who asked to remain anonymous, wrote later:

“Instinct kicked in and I chased that guy out of the subway as the doors were closing, down the platform, up the stairs, over the overpass, down the stairs on the other side, running him down the platform where he couldn’t go anywhere….He turned around and didn’t understand why I was still chasing him screaming ‘STOP HIM!!! That little shit stole my phone!!!!!'”

The thief eventually jumped onto the south-bound tracks and ran into the subway tunnel at the edge of the station. An approaching B train stopped when the train’s driver saw the thief on the tracks, and he was told to enter the train.

At this point — the train doors were locked until the police arrived. One of the passengers on the B train wrote to us in an email about being locked in a train car with the thief.

“The conductor came into our car. opened the doors and shouted for the man to “get on the train”.

Eventually, this young man did get on the train, after which the doors closed and the conductor left about ten of us passengers alone in the car with the thief!.

I heard metal sounds as he unloaded his hoodie and pants of stolen goods. He tried to wipe clean his sooty hands and he took off this skin tight hood he was wearing to try to change his appearance. I got up and went to the front of the car and tapped on the cab window. I could hear several people in there trying to decide what to do.

I heard the female conductor say that “maybe we should call the police.” I rapped on the window and asked them to pull into the station which I could see through the front window. A man kept telling me “no” they would not pull into the station.

I sat down and quietly called 911. Most of the other passengers (a family sitting across from me did not speak English) seemed unaware of what was going on. I was afraid the man might have a weapon on him and become desperate because he definitely knew he was trapped.

Thankfully, he went quietly when we finally pulled into the station and the police boarded the train. But I am very disappointed in the stupid way this was handled. We should not have been trapped in a subway car with a criminal.”

The thief, a 16-year-old male from our area, was arrested and charged with grand larceny and criminal trespassing. The woman’s iphone was recovered from him and returned.

The earlier theft at the Cortelyou Road station is under investigation, police said.