group of homeless men who beat and gang-raped a woman in a Queens park for more than two hours late Thursday night told her that they planned to kill her, according to a criminal complaint filed against the men yesterday.
The 42-year-old woman told the police and prosecutors that as the men took turns raping her, they said they would have to kill her because she could identify them, according to the complaint.
Investigators believe that at least six men were in the group, which beat and robbed the woman and her boyfriend near Flushing Meadows-Corona Park before dragging her, by either her hair or her feet, across a Long Island Rail Road train platform and through about 30 yards of underbrush to a filthy makeshift shanty, where they sexually assaulted her.
Calling the attack "a devastating ordeal of violation and terror," Richard A. Brown, the Queens district attorney, said it would probably have ended with the woman's murder had a Police Department dog and its handler not tracked the woman to the shanty and interrupted the attack.
Another law enforcement official added, "She fully expected at the end of the sexual attacks that she was going to be murdered, executed."
The police arrested five homeless men, all between 18 and 28 years old, — after the attack, and a police official said yesterday that investigators were seeking at least two other men, focusing on areas where homeless people congregate. The woman and her boyfriend were unsure how many men attacked them because they were quickly surrounded and overwhelmed by the gang, a law enforcement official said.
In videotaped statements, four of the five arrested men admitted beating and sexually assaulting the woman, according to the complaint. They were charged with first-degree rape, first-degree sodomy, second-degree kidnapping and second-degree robbery, and face up to 25 years in prison if convicted. The fifth was charged only with criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor, officials said.
The four charged in the attack — Carlos Rodriguez, 22, Victor Cruz, 22, Jose Hernandez, 18, and Luis Carmona, 20 — were arraigned yesterday in Queens Criminal Court before Acting Justice Barry Kron of State Supreme Court, who ordered them held without bail. Bail was set at $500 for the fifth man, Jesus Torres, 28.
A law enforcement official said that all four men identified Mr. Rodriguez as the leader of the attack and that investigators believe that he belongs to a Mexican gang known as the Knights of Destruction. He has denied membership in the gang, officials said, but has a tattoo on his arm that says KOD.
Mr. Rodriguez has previously served two brief jail terms, for robbery and assault, the police said.
As the search for additional attackers continued yesterday, the police said the shanty and others near it, which were on property owned by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, were torn down.
A law enforcement official said the events began about 9:15 p.m. Thursday, when the men descended on the woman and her boyfriend as they walked on a promenade that connects the Willets Point subway station to the National Tennis Center in the park. After beating and robbing them, the men dragged the woman onto the Long Island Rail Road platform, below the subway station, and then about 60 feet through a wooded area to one of several shanties where they lived, the official said. The shanties are in a hidden area accessible only by crossing the third rail or by climbing down from the station platform, said Parks and Recreation Department workers who were in the park yesterday.
The woman, who has two children aged 21 and 10 and has been separated from her husband for about two years, cried out "Help me! Help me!" as she was dragged away, the official said. After the men had taken her into the shanty and thrown her on a mattress, she begged for mercy, the official said.
After the woman was dragged off, the injured boyfriend ran in search of help and used a borrowed cellphone to call 911, the police said. Officers flooded the area, but because of the thick darkness did not find the woman until shortly after midnight.
The official said the woman was severely traumatized, with bruises and cuts all over her body and one eye swollen shut.
Several parks department employees who were in the area yesterday said they were shocked that any of the local homeless men, who use the train station bathrooms and sleep in the park, would turn violent.
"Most of them are pitiful — I've talked to them about their lives," said one worker, who declined to give his name. "Never in my life did I think they'd be violent."