RAPE ON APT. STEPS
No help from locals
A 26yearold woman was snatched off the sidewalk by a stranger and raped on her boyfriend’s front steps in Morningside Heights.
The terrifying predawn attack happened just a block from Central Park.
The bludgeoned victim had to be carried from the scene on a gurney, distraught neighbors said after the 5:15 a.m. Saturday incident on Manhattan Avenue at Cathedral Parkway.
The woman told police she doesn’t know the attacker but believes he followed her before striking just steps from where her boyfriend lives with his grandmother.
The fiend beat and violated her outside the building, and was still being sought Saturday night.
“I’d rather catch him — before they catch him,” the victim’s dad told The Post at the scene, gesturing toward a group of crimescene detectives, before joining his daughter at St. Luke’s Hospital. The victim said she screamed for help, but no one seemed to hear her, a police source said. She was in stable condition late Saturday.
One detective donned purple latex gloves before picking up a pair of turquoise panties from the pavement and carefully placing them inside a paper evidence bag for vouchering and DNA testing.
The woman’s boyfriend is not a suspect, police said.
“Her face was bruised. She was sedated and she had a tube, a respirator and a brace on her neck,” neigh bor Carlos Cardenales, 48.
“I’m so sad I didn’t hear anything,” he said.
“There’s been problems in this building for some time,” he said, adding that residents have been requesting surveillance cameras.
“I’ve had to stop fights,” he said. “All the women in the building are scared.”
A firstfloor resident who asked not to be named said at the time of the attack, someone began banging frantically on her door and ringing her doorbell — but she was too scared to open her door.
“Bang, bang, bang! Ring, ring, ring! I was so scared,” she told The Post.
“I’m alone, and it’s hard,” she said of regretting not having helped. “But if I had opened the door, then maybe he would have had two victims.”
The suspect was pushing a red, vintage bicycle and is described as 20 to 25 years old, wearing a blue shirt and dark jeans.