Rapist Strikes Twice Outside Nightclub
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Police investigators are on the hunt for a rapist who is targeting young women outside of an exclusive nightclub on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
The suspect has struck twice outside of the Box, a restaurant and nightclub at 189 Christie St., police officials said. In both cases, the victims were assaulted after leaving the star-studded hangout owned by a Broadway scion, Simon Hammerstein, police sources said.
The first victim, a 25-year-old whom police did not identify, was grabbed from behind on September 30 and forced into a white sport-utility vehicle at about 3 a.m., police said. The victim was forced to drink an unknown liquid, taken across a bridge — the victim was unsure of which one — and raped and sodomized, police said. Before dumping the victim onto a street in Queens, the suspect forced her to remove money from an automatic teller machine, police said. The police department waited to inform the public of the incident until yesterday, four days after investigators believe the same suspect struck again outside of the nightclub.
The second rape occurred Saturday at about 3 a.m. when the suspect, posing as a livery cab driver, lured the unidentified 23-year-old victim into a black sedan, police said. The suspect drove the victim over the Williamsburg Bridge and after parking in an alley, climbed into the back seat of the sedan and raped her, police said.
While both victims depicted the assailant as a white male, they gave widely varying descriptions of the suspect’s age. The first victim judged him as being between 25 and 30; the second victim described him as being in his 40’s. Investigators believe they are looking for the same man.
“We’re treating this as a pattern rape,” a police source working on the case said yesterday.
Management at the Box, which was issued several sanitary violations in August by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and has been criticized for its extreme exclusivity, has aided in the investigation.