Police made a new arrest Tuesday in an alleged group assault on two NYPD officers in Times Square last month and on Wednesday rearrested another man in connection with the incident on separate shoplifting charges, according to the department.
A 17-year-old was arrested on assault charges in connection with the Jan. 27 brawl, police said. They said they arrested him in Midtown, near where the incident took place.
He will be arraigned Wednesday morning, at which time a judge will decide whether to release him, set bail or hold him in custody. Police did not release his name, and his attorney information wasn’t immediately available.
The teenager joins five other people who have already been arrested and charged in the caught-on-camera melee that went viral, sparking outrage and misinformation after law enforcement officials identified the suspects as recently arrived migrants.
One of those men, 19-year-old Darwin Andres Gomez-Izquiel, was rearrested in Queens on Wednesday morning. NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Operations Kaz Daughtry had earlier posted on social media a wanted flier saying Gomez-Izquiel was being sought for acting as a lookout for a group suspected of shoplifting at a Macy’s on Queens Boulevard.
“I’m dismayed that he got rearrested on robbery charges, but we’ll see how these allegations play out,” said Mark Macron, Gomez-Izquiel’s attorney, who said he hadn’t yet heard about the latest arrest when reached by phone. “I’m not going to concede that he was involved in these things. … I have to see more information.”
The 19-year-old was released last month after his initial arrest for the alleged assault on the two police officers. He was one of seven people indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg last week for their roles in the incident.
Two of the people listed in the indictment were unnamed and unapprehended at the time, according to the DA’s office. It was not immediately clear whether the 17-year-old arrested Tuesday was one of those individuals.
Police body camera footage released by Bragg’s office shows the two officers attempting to move the group of young men away from the front of the Candler Building near Times Square, where they had been congregating.
All of the men complied, the video shows, but 24-year-old Yohenry Brito lagged behind to reach into a stroller that belonged to one of the men, who was carrying a baby. The officers pushed Brito up against a wall as he asked aloud in Spanish why they’d stopped him.
According to a criminal complaint, Brito swung his arms and tensed up, causing him and the officers to fall to the ground. As he tried to get away, video shows some members of the group attempting to pull the officers away taking swings and kicks at them. One person is accused of kicking an officer’s police radio and another is accused of changing clothing with Brito to avoid detection.
Only Brito was kept in custody, and he faces a range of charges, including two counts of second-degree assault, one count of second-degree obstructing governmental administration, one count of tampering with physical evidence and one count of hindering prosecution.
Besides Gomez-Izquiel, three other men were released shortly after the incident, sparking criticism from police and some elected officials. NYPD officials said in interviews that the four released after their arrest had fled the state on a bus, but prosecutors and defense attorneys for some of the men have denied those claims.
Bragg has also defended his office’s decision not to request bail for all the men. At a press conference last week, he said prosecutors did not immediately ask a judge to keep them in jail, because they were still investigating the incident and wanted to ensure that no one who wasn’t actually involved ended up incarcerated. The judge could have set bail anyway — as all the defendants faced charges that were serious enough under New York law — but chose not to.
Officials in the DA’s office said a total of 11 people were involved in the assault, contrary to the NYPD’s initial estimate of 14.
This is a developing story and may be updated. Samantha Max contributed reporting.
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