It’s hard to know what three muggers were thinking when they held up a six-person Bible study group in the middle of a Sunday afternoon last month, but it’s pretty certain they weren’t expecting their victims to be broke.
The group, with ages spanning from 13 to 41, was sitting in a pavilion between 2 and 3 p.m. at the Lakeland Community Park in central College Park on May 23 when three men approached, all described as teenagers, police said.
One of the assailants flashed a black handgun, police said, and the men demanded those in the group empty their pockets.
Unfortunately for them, those pockets were empty.
“Only one of them had anything of value, and that was one dollar,” said Lt. Stanley Johnson, a spokesman for the Maryland-National Capital Park Police, which is investigating the robbery. “It really lets you know how some people are today.”
Johnson also added that attempts to catch the robbers were hampered by the group’s delay in calling the police — despite the attack happening between 2 and 3 p.m., no one called police until 5:15 that evening. The group may have never really considered the robbery to be an emergency, Johnson said.
The Bible study group had not returned to the park at the same time the following Sunday. The only person in the park at the time of a reporter’s visit declined to comment.
But Angel Benitez, 17, of Beltsville, who was watching a soccer game next door at the College Park Community Center said it worried him. He’d gone to Lakeland Park a few times, he said, but hadn’t heard about the robbery.
“Maybe it’s a one-time thing,” Benitez said. “I’ve never felt unsafe before, but it’s more of a risk now.”
Johnson wouldn’t say where the Bible group had come from. A church group also meets at the community center; a man working at the center’s desk declined to be identified but said he didn’t think the victims were from that congregation. Members of the Embry African Methodist Episcopal Church and First Baptist Church of College Park, both located near the park on Lakeland Road, said the Bible group was not from their churches either.
Jim Claiborne, a First Baptist Church member, said he was surprised to hear about the robbery nearby.
“It’s bad news any time people are getting robbed in a park,” Claiborne said. “That’s just sad.”
But while the time and place of this robbery are unusual, police said it’s not so different from muggings that happen in dark alleys in the middle of the night.
“We find a lot of these crimes are crimes of opportunity,” Johnson said. “There’s no rhyme or reason to it; they’re walking down the street and think ‘there’s some people we can get.'”
Police described their three suspects in the mugging as a Hispanic man with short hair, a white T-shirt and a cast on his left arm; and two black men, one with light skin and a black and white checkered scarf over his face and the other with darker skin and shoulder-length dreadlocks.
They entered the park from the intersection of Lakeland Road and Rhode Island Avenue and fled along Rhode Island toward Berwyn Heights, police said.
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