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Armed with arrest warrants, a team of Englewood and NYPD detectives swept through several locations in the Bronx last Thursday and, by day’s end, had all five men under arrest and booked at the 44th Precinct, Detective Capt. Timothy Torell told CLIFFVIEW PILOT.
Yesterday the sixth suspect, Ebenita Wright, was charged with simple assault and hindering after she surrendered at Englewood police headquarters.
MUGSHOTS / SURVEILLANCE IMAGES: Courtesy ENGLEWOOD PD
Wright acknowledged that she was with the group the night of the Jan. 25 attack at the Mobil gas station on eastbound Route 4.
That night, police said, two carloads of people coming from a late night Englewood party entered the station’s store area around 2:30 a.m. and began stealing candy, cigarettes and lighters.
Wright claimed that she didn’t participate in either the shoplifting or the beating, which left the attendant with several broken and fractured facial bones after he tried to stop the group, Torell said.
Video from the store’s security surveillance system shows her trying to usher the others out after they began arguing with the manager, the captain said — but then hitting the victim with her handbag and trying to prevent him from writing down the license plate numbers of the cars the group fled in.
Three others in the group joined in the beating and a fifth man who’d been waiting in a car got out, went inside and hit the manager with a large ice scraper, he said.
Videos and screen shots were published on CLIFFVIEW PILOT and elsewhere following the attack — the result of which produced “many calls from the public that assisted us greatly in identifying the persons responsible,” Torell said.
SEE: Englewood police seek public’s help nailing thugs in clerk beatings
Those calls, along with “tremendous assistance” from NYPD and the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office Intelligence Division, helped crack the case, the captain said.
Charged with robbery, aggravated assault and rioting are (mugshots, right, top to bottom):
Michael Lauture, 18
Charles Ward, 21
Marcus Hairston, 18
Tyquan Strother, 18
Charged with aggravated assault, weapons possession and robbery is 19-year-old Alonzo Richardson — the man who Torell said got out of the car.
All five men were being held pending extradition to New Jersey.
Wright, meanwhile, was released on a court summons.
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