By Jeff Lipton
The three suspects were identified by police as Jaleel Dejesus, 17, of Church Street; Kayvon Gonzalez, 16, of Carnation Avenue; and Cheneere Barrett, also 16, of Cherrywood Drive. They are accused of phoning in a phony order to Mayflower restaurant on Milburn Avenue last Thursday at 8:35 p.m., and giving a Harvard Place address for the delivery, according to 1st Squad detectives.
"They sent him on a fictitious food delivery," said Nassau Police Department spokesman Michael Aronsen. "The address wasn't a fake, but the order was."
When the deliveryman arrived with the food and was looking for the address, the trio was waiting for him, police said. Dejesus and Gonzalez hid alongside the house, while Barrett acted as a lookout. Dejesus and Gonzalez then confronted the victim, with Dejesus punching him in the head and knocking him to the ground, detectives said. They then tried to steal the victim's money and the food but ran away empty-handed when a resident came out of the house and yelled at them.
Police officers from the 1st Precinct responded and spotted the teens a short time later, arresting them on charges of second-degree attempted robbery. They were arraigned in First District Court in Hempstead on March 21.
The victim, whose name was withheld by police, suffered cuts on both knees and complained of head pain, but was not hospitalized. "He's OK - he did not get hurt badly," Tony Chen, a Mayflower restaurant employee, said of the deliveryman. "But he's really scared right now."
If the neighbor had not interceded, Chen said, the deliveryman may have been beaten more severely. "He was lucky," he added. "He was lucky that the person came out of the house to look at that time."
Chen said it was the first time that a deliveryman has been mugged in the more than two years Mayflower has been open. "I think that the area is OK," he said. "We just have to be careful with that type of delivery. It could be dangerous."
"It happens periodically throughout the county, [so] I wouldn't say it's limited to Baldwin," Aronsen said of food-delivery robberies.
Comments about this story? jlipton@liherald.com or (516) 569-4000 ext. 210.
