Alleged thief who snatched Brooklyn boy’s scooter arrested: cops
Cops busted the lowlife who allegedly snatched a little boy’s scooter as the kid rode down a Brooklyn street — and he admitted he did it just to sell it off for drug money, police said Monday.
Ex-con Daniel Ufares, 59, who was once arrested for attempted murder, was nailed Monday on charges of criminal possession of stolen property, authorities said.
His ex-wife told That Post on Monday that the scooter crime was low — even for her serial-thief former spouse.
“I would never have thought he’d do that to kids,’’ the disgusted ex said. “He’s a lowlife.”
The heartless suspect was allegedly captured on surveillance footage committing his crime — enabling cops to identify him by running the video through the NYPD’s facial-recognition technology, sources told The Post.
The video shows the creep grabbing the then-6-year-old boy’s e-scooter by the handlebars as the child rode by and then taking off with the wheels in Borough Park on July 7, authorities said.
The child was left traumatized by the theft, his dad told The Post afterward — adding that the scooter actually belonged to another son with special needs who used it to get around.
NYPD officers gifted the family with a new e-scooter on the now-7-year-old victim’s birthday last week.
“We didn’t recover the [stolen] scooter,” a police spokesman told The Post on Monday — revealing that Ufares confessed to investigators he sold it to get money for drugs.
At the time of the theft, Ufares was still on parole and under supervised release for a 2010 Queens robbery, according to court records and cops.
He had served nine years of a 15-year sentence for the robbery before being conditionally released in 2019, records show. His supervised release didn’t run out till 2024.
While out on parole for the 2010 robbery, Ufares also was previously pinched at least twice — for allegedly swiping steaks from a Key Foods in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and six packs of cooked shrimp from a Food Bazaar in Greenpoint in the borough, authorities said.
His arrest record stretches back to a Queens robbery in 1984 — and includes an attempted-murder rap five years later in The Bronx, according to police. The disposition of both cases was not immediately known.
He did more than five years in prison for drug-peddling and violating parole, too, starting in September 1993, according to state records. He was released in January 1999.
Before that, he landed a three-year sentence for attempted burglary and did time for it from September 1991 to December 1992, records state.
Ufares also was arrested for allegedly assaulting a cop in 1991, police said. The outcome of that case is not clear.
Ufares apologized to the kid as he was walked out of the 66th Precinct in Brooklyn and loaded into a squad car on Monday night.
“I’m sorry,” he told reporters when asked what he had to say to the child.
Asked about facing the possibility of more time behind bars, he replied, “it doesn’t make a difference.”
Ufares’s ex, who asked that her name be withheld, said she’s known him since the pair were teens and married him while he was locked up during one of his prison stints.
She said they divorced while he was still behind bars, although she took him back again, for about a year, before they split for good.
“It was really a nightmare,’’ the woman said. “One time, he wasn’t around, and his parole officers came, and they turned my whole apartment upside down looking for I don’t know what.
“But he wasn’t here. They scared my kids, they scared my grandkids.”
Additional reporting by Kate Sheehy
