A man kicked a 65-year-old woman to the ground in broad daylight on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk on Monday, stomped on her several times and made anti-Asian remarks in what the police called another targeted hate crime.
The police said the attack happened around 11:40 a.m. outside an apartment building at 360 W. 43rd St., where a surveillance video showed an unidentified man kick the woman in the torso after the two approached each one another on the sidewalk.
The attacker, who the police department’s hate crimes task force asked for the public’s help in identifying, stomped on the woman’s upper body and head at least three times after she fell to the ground.
The victim was hospitalized at NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan with what the police described as serious injuries. Further information about her condition was not immediately available.
The video, which was released by the police and drew widespread attention online, showed a man who appeared to be a building worker standing in the lobby, unwilling to intervene. He then closed the building’s front door while the woman was lying on the ground after the attacker walked off.
The management company for the luxury apartment building did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Tuesday morning.
The attack represented another jarring reminder of the rise in violent crimes targeting people of Asian descent across the United States, which advocates say has been exacerbated by pandemic-related racism. On March 16, a gunman killed six women of Asian descent in attacks on massage businesses in the Atlanta area that left eight people dead.
The assault on the woman in Midtown Manhattan also came as hate crimes investigators said they were investigating the subway beating of an Asian man on a busy J train in Brooklyn, an attack that was recorded by another passenger in a TikTok video that has been viewed more than 2 million times. The unidentified attacker, who was still at large, punched the man repeatedly and put him in a chokehold until the man became unconscious. The timing of the attack and the nature of the victim’s injuries were not immediately clear.
According to the New York Police Department, there have been 33 hate crimes with an Asian victim so far this year, two of which were motivated by the coronavirus pandemic. The police did not say if Monday’s attack was connected to Covid-19.