UPDATE: The woman who identified Joshua Flecha in a lineup as her assailant has since stated that Flecha is NOT the person who attacked her. Five other assault victims who had viewed him in a lineup didn't identify him as their attacker.
Police were watching a man on 17th Street near 10th Avenue in Windsor Terrace at 3:15 this morning. They thought that he intended to break into a parked car. Instead, they found him masturbating to porn on his cell phone. They arrested him for criminal possession of marijuana.
Police were watching a man on 17th Street near 10th Avenue in Windsor Terrace at 3:15 this morning. They thought that he intended to break into a parked car. Instead, they found him masturbating to porn on his cell phone. They arrested him for criminal possession of marijuana.
Then they noticed that he resembles one of the men depicted in the NYPD police sketches as wanted for sexual assault. Next, a woman who was assaulted on May 7th identified him in a lineup. In that incident, a man grabbed a woman’s breasts from behind as she was entering a turnstile at the 8th Avenue entrance of the 7th Avenue F train station, exposed himself, and masturbated.
The charges against Joshua Flecha, in addition to the marijuana charge, are forcible touching and sexual abuse. Flecha, a thirty-two-year-old resident of Astoria, Queens, is a bartender in a midtown Manhattan bar.
Nobody knows how many men are guilty of the twenty sexual assaults that began in March.