Subway raccoon shows his stripes, refuses MTA capture in Brooklyn
Catch me if you can!
Cops and transit workers spent seven hours trying — and failing — to capture the elusive raccoon that’s moved into downtown Brooklyn’s Nevins Street subway station Friday.
“He’s not stupid you know,” one cop said while his colleagues called out to striped critter that subway station workers dubbed “Chepe.”
Workers from three different agencies — city police, animal control and the state’s transit authority — repeatedly attempted to lure the masked mammal into a cage stocked with edible goodies.
Officials even briefly had local 2 and 3 Trains skip the station Friday afternoon while they tried to catch Chepe.
First, they tried to lure him from his nest in the train tunnel with bread crumbs.
They nearly nabbed the clever critter by stuffing a cage full of food, including plantains, a chicken and a bagel.
But Chepe scampered out when police tried to shut him inside.
A Post photographer captured the moment as Chepe stared down one cop trying to convince him to turn himself in to the law.
By 3 p.m., workers gave up and put the cage back in the closet.
“It’s more likely that the night crew will get him when everything’s calmed down,” said one officer.
Transit workers have regularly spotted Nevins Street’s newest resident in the nearly two months since he was first appeared in November.
Transit workers said Chepe, who has dug himself in near the station’s break room, has been living in the station long enough to earn his name.
“I want a picture of the raccoon!” one worker, who was not helping the effort, joked.
“It’s been down here for five days and you haven’t caught it?” she teased her colleagues.
“He usually comes out, he’s just scared of the train noise,” another worker said.
But word of Chepe’s Nevins Street residency only spread publicly after he was spotted by Thursday by two passing straphangers.
Prospect Heights resident Seth Gross, 50, shot photos of the masked marauder from the subway car as it was pulling into the station.
He then alerted the station’s cops at the other end of the platform.
“I said ‘Hey, I don’t know if you saw, but there’s a raccoon over there,” Gross said. “And they said, ‘Oh, he’s back!’”
A Twitter user also informed the MTA of the raccoon’s return on Thursday. “He is on the south end of the platform in front of a maintenance door getting his photo taken by onlookers,” the user said.
@NYCTSubway replied: “Thanks for letting us know. Is he posing for the camera?”
Raccoon-related train disruptions have more than doubled this year compared to 2018.