Man Accused of Three Central Park Rapes Arrested in Miami

Police have arrested the man they say raped a 39-year-old woman at knifepoint on the east side of Central Park last month, and they’re also accusing him of two attacks in the park that go back as far as 2021.

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Dereck Rivera-Deleon, 30, was taken into custody on Tuesday, November 10, while he was at work at a Burger King in Miami, police said. NYPD detectives and the U.S. Marshals made the arrest. Before that, officers tracked him to Miami through his electronics, one law enforcement official told the New York Times.

The most recent attack happened shortly before 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, October 24, while the woman was jogging near East 66th Street. Police said a man dressed in black came up to her with a knife, dragged her into a wooded area and assaulted her before running off. Emergency medical workers took her to a nearby hospital, and police released images of the suspect as they searched for him.

Police said Rivera-Deleon will also be charged in two earlier rapes in the park, one in 2021 and one in 2023. Three law enforcement officials told the Times that on July 19, 2021, a 23-year-old woman reported that she’d been raped the day before. One of the officials said DNA evidence collected after that attack was used to identify Rivera-Deleon and tie him to the October assault.

In the 2023 case, an 18-year-old woman went to the 75th Precinct in Brooklyn early on October 7 and reported that a man had raped her at 11 p.m. the night before, the officials said. She told police she knew the man and gave them the name Dereck Rivera.

It isn’t clear why Rivera-Deleon was in Miami or where he lived full time, though public records show a recent Brooklyn address associated with his name, the Times reported. The paper’s first search of several New York and Florida public databases didn’t turn up any previous criminal history for him.

The October attack was the fifth rape in Central Park this year, two more than in all of 2025, police said. Officers had already made arrests in three of the earlier cases. After the attack, the NYPD stepped up patrols in the park. Other violent crimes there had already worried New Yorkers: in September, a 63-year-old woman who lived in the park was killed, and on October 18, three men hit a 32-year-old woman on her bicycle in the head and robbed her.

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Serious crime is still relatively rare in a park that gets tens of millions of visits a year. Even so, police data cited by the Times show 93 major felonies in the park from the start of the year through November 8. That’s nearly an 18 percent increase over the same period last year. The category includes murder, rape, burglary and felony assault.

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