While the incident was happening, Mr. Supley called for help to an older woman across the street, who didn’t want to get involved and kept walking. A man named James, who lives in the neighborhood and asked that his full name be withheld, was walking home with his fiancée and wanted to run over and help, but his fiancée protested. “He got up, grabbed his glasses from underneath the car, and we ran up to him to make sure he was O.K.,” James said by phone from the law office where he works. “He was pretty rattled. His elbows and nose were bloody. He was O.K. but pretty shaken and ticked off.”
James lent Mr. Supley his phone–”I have a crappy little cell phone”–to call the police.
The teens were African-American and about 17 years old, wearing dark blue jeans. “They were bigger than him. He was pretty small and kind of skinny,” James said.
Though the New York Police Department does not keep statistics on iPhone thefts, anecdotally the desirable device has led to more elaborate schemes. On the Upper East Side, for instance, there were recently a series of bicycle drive-bys, as a thief traveling at high velocity grabbed phones out of victims’ hands and kept going. And there was the story earlier this month of the ballet dancer in San Francisco who took four punches, remained upright and pulled some violent ballet moves on four men attempting to steal his iPhone. The dancer prevailed.
Unlike other phones, which when stolen can be replaced for the same price for which they were originally purchased, a stolen or lost iPhone, according to an Apple spokesperson, costs between $499 and $699 to recover, since AT&T subsidizes the price of the phone only when you sign a two-year contract. A MobileMe function on the phone can help locate it, but the browser at the police station was too slow to pull up its location. It finally showed up 40 minutes later, on an L train near Wilson Avenue, just long enough for Mr. Supley to remotely lock the phone, and then the signal disappeared altogether.
“AT&T said if I had been mugged three days earlier, they could have reset my eligibility, but they couldn’t help me,” said Mr. Supley, adding that the service provider told him he had to talk to the retailer from whom he purchased the phone: Apple, his employer. He plans to talk to his supervisor about replacing the phone at the discounted rate.
After the mugging, Mr. Supley retold the story to his 1,336 friends on Facebook. “I wasn’t sure I would at first, but I decided I should just let people know to be careful.” The post received 40 responses from his friends; at first they expressed concern for Mr. Supley, then they started sharing stories of other iPhone thefts.
“The cops who came said it was something that was on the rise,” Mr. Supley said. “People are coming from the bad areas into the good areas. It’s happening places where people don’t expect it to happen, like midtown and the West Village. I guess people come down from way up north in groups and hang around that Christopher Street area now.”
Mr. Supley has taken his vintage glasses, which suffered a few scratches, to several repair shops, and they are currently being fixed. And if he does eventually replace the phone, he said he will be more careful to keep his phone out of a potential thief’s predatory gaze.
“The phone has GPS, it gives you directions, you want to walk and find where you’re going, or you’re texting or using Skype to chat with someone for free. It lives in your hand so you really have to fight the temptation especially if you’re alone and out and about,” he said. “It just woke me up that some people, all they see is a $1000 bill waving around in your hand, not a phone.”
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