This particular Apple was not just picked, it was picked twice, a white blur as it flew from hand to hand to hand on the same afternoon. And one of those hands seemingly belonged to that timeless character from countless police stories: the dumb criminal.

It was Nov. 23, a little before 4 p.m., and a 16-year-old girl was walking through Prospect Park near her home, holding her iPhone. It was an iPhone 4S — not even one of the newest ones. Her parents had warned her about the phone’s distracting her in public. The ears through which those words had traveled, in one and out the other, were stuffed with white ear buds blasting the hip-hop song “Definition.”

As she neared a pond, three boys about her age approached. One wore pink sneakers. A boy grabbed the iPhone, and the girl pulled it back, and the boy pulled harder. The brief tug of war ended with the boy winning. “I just kind of gave them a dirty look and they left,” the girl said this week, asking that her name be withheld from this article.

iPhones are popular to steal because they can be easily reprogrammed and then sold on the black market. The victim of this particular iPhone crime turned and went back through the park the way she had come. She saw two police officers standing nearby and told them what had happened. The officers drove her around the park for a while, looking down paths and roads, but there was no sign of the boys.

They had split up. The one carrying the stolen phone took it to Flatbush. He showed it to a man on Bedford Avenue who seemed interested in buying it. But instead, the man simply snatched the phone from the boy and ran away.