Just three months before Barnard College freshman Tessa Majors was...

The fatal mugging of Barnard College freshman Tessa Majors in Morningside Park last week — allegedly at the hands of three boys ages 13 and 14 — came as little surprise in a neighborhood already reeling from rising crime and roving bands of ­violent youths.

The park was the most dangerous in the city for muggings in the first nine months of 2019, logging 11 robberies in that period, according to NYPD statistics.

By comparison, there were 10 reported muggings in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and nine in Claremont Park in The Bronx in that same period.

Reports of violent crime and sex crimes spiked 82 percent in Morningside Park and on its perimeter in the past year ending Dec. 8, according to the NYPD.

There have been 21 reported muggings in the park and on its perimeter this year compared with 11 during the same period a year prior.

Much of the violence comes at the hands of young teenagers, police and residents say.

“I was robbed in Morningside Park in August,” a 24-year-old man told The Post, describing the location as one block north from where Majors was attacked.

Three or four kids, maybe 13 or 14 years old, threatened the man with a box cutter at 2 p.m. on a Friday afternoon and he handed them $120 in cash, he recalled. The account was confirmed by cops.

“I was told by police that it was not a very safe place to be,” the victim said. “Most people know somebody who has gotten robbed there.”

Teens have been a constant menace at a deli a block from where Majors, 18, was murdered Wednesday as she walked through the park at 7 p.m.

“The kids, they come in, they steal all the time,” said a clerk who asked not to be identified by name.

“When we speak to them they curse us. They use bad words,” the clerk added. “When I call the police they run away.”

Addressing Major’s death, he said, shaking his head, of the teen suspects, “They destroy themselves . . . and this poor, innocent girl.”

In May, two 13-year-old girls were arrested and accused of running a boys-and-girls crime crew after police caught them beating a 40-year-old woman with a stick on Amsterdam Avenue near West 135th Street, according to cops.

The victim had asked the girls to stop running around inside the medical clinic where she works, she told The Post at the time.

“F–king bitch!” one of the young assailants screamed during the beat down, according to her account.

Police believe three neighborhood boys fatally knifed Majors, a musician and aspiring journalist from Charlottesville, Va.

The first boy arrested in the case — ­Zyairr Davis, a 13-year-old weighing barely 110 pounds — remains in custody and has been charged with felony murder after police say he admitted being there with the two other boys, both 14.

“They travel in packs,” said Darius DiTullio, 61, who owns a nearby day-care center for pets. “They hang around making a lot of noise in the streets, in the neighborhood and all along the park.”

He recently confronted a group of teens of about the same age as the slaying suspects when one of them spat into his basement.

“I spoke to him,” DiTullio recalled. “I said, ‘Listen, you can hang out with your friends, but don’t be spitting on my property.’ He said to me, ‘F–k you, suck my d- -k.’ ”

But police were apparently unimpressed with his problem.

“I made a complaint to the cops” at the 26th Precinct station house by phone, he told The Post. “A lady told me to tell them to ‘move along.’ ”

“They don’t want to listen,” he said of the teenagers. “They want to do what they want to.”

The neighborhood needs more policing and the park needs more lighting, things the community has requested for years, a woman who has lived in Morningside Heights for 40 years told The Post.

“Now they are coming around,” she said of the extra police. “But it’s not too late. They can still do something to prevent someone else from dying.”

Additional reporting by Laura Italiano, Khristina Narizhnaya and Georgett Roberts