What a conspicuous getaway vehicle….
A pair of boys who could barely drive slipped into a Brooklyn school bus storage lot early Labor Day — smashing through the gate with one bus and making off with two others in a brazen-but-blundering ordeal, according to cops and a nearby resident.
The boys — who witness Jenny Hoffman, 35, said appeared to be around 12 or 13 years old — climbed a barbed wire fence and hopped into an unattended bus in the lot on Otsego Street near Sigourney Street in Red Hook around 12:15 a.m., according to police.
The fence had a T-shirt draped over it, presumably placed there by the boys for protection from the barbs, said Hoffman, whose Nest doorbell camera captured the action.
Once they were in the lot, what commenced was a 40-minute comedy of errors as the boys scratched their heads on how to get the buses through the gate.
The pair attempted to push the gate with the nose of one of the buses, made multiple three-point turns, idled, reversed course, briefly gave up, chatted with someone on walkie-talkies and ultimately opted to back out, breaking the gate from the rear, Hoffman said.
“I think it wasn’t working as easily as they wanted it to,” Hoffman said. “They took breaks. They kept getting in and out of the bus and talking — like, ‘How are we gonna get this gate open?’ — and then went back in. They made a lot of three-point turns. I don’t know, It was definitely an unprofessional job, definitely not an in-and-out operation. I’m sort of impressed they made it out at all.”
“They literally broke the gate backing it out,” she added.
Partway through the botched heist, Hoffman’s boyfriend stepped outside to confront the boys.
“One of them was out front, keeping watch, and my boyfriend was like, ‘Hey, what’s going on?’” Hoffman said. “They had walkie-talkies and they kept saying, ‘Are you going to call the cops?’ And he said, ‘I didn’t mention the cops, you did. What’s the situation?’ It looked suspicious, but I think in the moment, he just wasn’t sure what was going on. This is a pretty sleepy corner. It’s pretty industrial so normally at that hour there aren’t any people about.”
“So one of them said, ‘Oh, our father said we had to get these buses out by any means necessary, so that’s what we’re doing. Please don’t call the cops, he’ll get in trouble,’” she added. “It seemed like maybe somebody put them up to it. Who knows?”
The boys left the damaged bus parked on the street but took off with the two others that were in the lot, according to cops and the witness.
Leonard D’Amico, the general manager of Jofaz Transportation Inc., which owns the buses, said the company has kept buses in the neighborhood since 1994 “and we never had any problems.”
“I don’t understand how they weren’t caught, because it took them so long,” D’Amico said. “It’s crazy. Now I’ve got to get a new fence and pay somebody to guard the place. I’ve got three yards out there.”
He hasn’t gotten word on whether cops recovered the two missing buses.
“We have GPS on all of them, but one of them might have been a new bus that we didn’t put the GPS on,” D’Amico said.
The young crooks remained at large Monday afternoon.
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September 08, 2020 at 12:43AM
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Boys swipe school buses from Brooklyn lot - New York Post
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