The Bad Sunday In The Park

Real New Yorkers don't gawk from the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. But, just like tourists, even jaded natives love to stroll through Central Park, maybe kick back in a paddleboat, nosh a hot dog, gather for the world's best people watching. It's an oasis--today a safe one, usually--so how on June 11 did it become a hunting ground for a roving pack of sexual aggressors? How did four or five dozen guys, some obviously drunk and stoned, get away with groping and in some cases stripping as many as 47 women during the festivities of Puerto Rican Day? What happened to the new New York City?

Last week the answers got caught up in several of the city's roiling social debates, stoking resentments just in time for a hot summer, and were broadcast around the world, thanks to the fact that the events happened in the city's landmark park. Some victims said police didn't take them seriously when alerted that evening; some cops said their hands were tied by pols who wanted to avoid at all costs another racial incident sparked by the mostly white force. And no one wanted to face the scariest implication--that the city could again become the dangerous place it was 11 years ago, when the gang rape of a jogger gave Central Park its first "wilding" headlines.

This time the suspects, according to one of their lawyers, "were there chillin', smokin' a couple cigarettes and watchin' the babes go by." The Puerto Rican parade had developed a reputation as a great place for folks to ogle, since it usually falls on a hot day when people dress light and splash themselves to stay cool. Men had doused women with water in the past too. "Why do you think so many guys were out there with video cameras?" asks Gordon Ludwig, an attorney representing one of the first men arrested. But this year, Ludwig says, "it was like a wet-T-shirt contest that got out of control."

By week's end authorities had used the videotapes to piece together what happened. At first it seemed that a handful of women had been doused and grabbed by a rowdy but isolated group of men as more than 1 million people wandered into the fading sun after the parade. But as the week progressed, more women emerged, some saying their clothes had been torn off, their breasts and genitals pawed and poked, and not just during a few overheated minutes. Two said they had been attacked during the parade--hours before the incidents caught on tape--and two said they had been clawed at a preparade festival the night before.

Tourists and locals, white and minority women alike, endured the onslaught. "All day I got grabbed," says Yaneira Davis, 20, a Rutgers student. "The attitude was, 'I'm going to touch you, and I don't care what you say.'" During the most concentrated period, as a fluctuating group of 50 or so men roamed the southeast corner of the park for about an hour at sunset, as many as six of them penetrated an 18-year-old British woman with their hands.

It was she who succeeded in getting the attention of cops, and they made two arrests on the scene. By Saturday, 16 men were in custody. They ranged in age from 16 to 33 and included a barber, a minister's son and a father of two. The melee was "an innocent water fight that got out of hand," one of them told the New York Times.