Just before 9:30 PM on Saturday, a bunch of teens reportedly descended on a subway station in Oakland, California, stopped a train, hit some innocent people in the face, and ran off with a few passengers’ phones and bags, the East Bay Times reports.
Local authorities are now trying to identify the unarmed kids who pulled off the mass robbery at the Oakland Coliseum station—which left two people injured and seven without their belongings—but witnesses estimate there were anywhere between 40 to 60 teens involved. Alicia Trost, a spokeswoman with Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART), told the Times that investigators are now poring over the security tapes, but no arrests have been made so far.
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“I’ve been there 24 years and this is the first time I’ve heard of anything like this happening,” BART police officer Keith Garcia told SFGate.
According to BART, all of the thieves involved are minors, so authorities have teamed up with the Oakland cops, the police for Oakland’s school system, and the Oakland Housing Authority to try to pin some of the culprits down. They’ve got reels from security cameras installed on six of the train’s nine cars, but three cars lacked the equipment.
Rebecca Saltzman, the president of BART’s Board of Directors, said the transit authority was “taking this seriously” and looking to make arrests ASAP.
“This was obviously a terrible event and I’m sure very scary for the victims and the BART employees involved,” Saltzman told SFGate. “We’re looking at it very closely to see how we can respond to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
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