NEW YORK._ Two Dominican robbers identified as Carlos Perez, 24 years old, and Alvin Velez, 34, with 20 combined previous arrests for criminal offenses were arrested yesterday after crashing into a tree on Cedar Avenue and 179th Street in the Bronx while trying to escape a swarm of police who were pursuing them.
The two were handcuffed from the white Toyota minivan they were traveling in after the accident and charged with multiple federal charges for robbery and extortion.
Images from Freedom TV News channel show images of the incident in which Perez appears, telling reporters that “because I will be out on bail within 24 hours.”
Both were described as career criminals by the police and will not be able to get out of jail soon due to the nature of the charges, prosecutors said, for which the Hobbs Act is applied, which penalizes robbery and extortion.
Perez and Velez committed two armed robberies in two hours before crashing in their escape early Wednesday morning.
They robbed two food trucks during the wave of crimes they committed in the city’s five counties.
“Federal authorities will take a robbery at a commercial establishment because of interstate commerce, but in this particular case they will take it because of the history of the offenders, a very violent history,” said police detective chief James Essig during a press conference yesterday morning.
Perez and Velez were arrested 11 times before yesterday’s incident since 2001, including for sexual assault, assault, drugs, and attempted murder, and Velez spent eight years in a state prison before being released on conditional parole in 2021 and under supervised release until September 2025, he was arrested five times since being released from prison on drug charges earlier this month.
Perez is a notorious member of cell 280 affiliated with the violent gang “The Crips,” he was arrested nine times including drug trafficking, sexual assault, weapon possession, and alleged assault on a 79-year-old man in November 2022.
Both continued to commit a wave of violent robberies between 1:00 and 3:10 early Tuesday morning using the minivan that was stolen at gunpoint in the Ridgefield neighborhood of Queens on January 21, Detective Essig said.
The crime wave began shortly before 1:00 a.m. on Alstyne Avenue in Corona, Queens, on Tuesday, where they robbed a woman of a necklace and a cell phone.
At 1:05 a.m., they robbed $200, a phone, and credit cards from a couple of both sexes on Queens Boulevard, hitting the man with the gun they stole and leaving him unconscious.
From Queens, the robberies continued in Brooklyn, where at 1:45 a.m. they robbed $175 from an Arab food vendor “Halal” on Webman Avenue.
They returned to Queens 10 minutes after the Brooklyn robbery where they stole credit cards and $300 in cash, according to police.
At 2:35 a.m., they reappeared in Manhattan, where they robbed another food truck on Washington Square South, taking the victim’s phone.
The violent robbery wave ended around 3:05 a.m. on Cedar Avenue in the Bronx, where they crashed into a tree while trying to escape the police.
