Story at a glance
- The NYPD says it has arrested a man after a brutal attack of a 65-year-old Asian woman was captured on Monday.
- The attacker, identified as 38-year-old Brandon Elliot, has been charged with two counts of felony assault as a hate crime amongst other charges.
- Information has been released that Elliot was also previously convicted of killing his own mother.
- The attack is just one instance of a rising tide of violent crimes against Asian Americans in the United States.
A man in New York was arrested and charged early Wednesday morning in connection to an attack on a 65-year-old Filipino woman earlier this week.
The brutal assault was captured on camera Monday morning just before noon in the Manhattan neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. The victim was walking to church when the attacker yelled racist slurs at her before he began to assault her, unprovoked.
The victim was kicked in the stomach, which knocked her onto the sidewalk. Her assailant then proceeded to stomp on her head repeatedly. According to news sources, the victim has now been discharged from the hospital but suffered multiple injuries including a broken pelvis, facial swelling and leg pain.
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Brandon Elliot, the alleged attacker in question, was arrested at 1:10 a.m. on Wednesday at his home and charged with felony assault as a hate crime, according to a statement by the NYPD.
Elliot was also convicted of murdering his own mother in 2002 and reportedly released in 2019 on lifetime parole. The police said Elliot stabbed his mother in the heart three times while he was 19-years-old.
“Thanks to assistance from the public and excellent investigative work by @NYPDHateCrimes Detectives, the individual wanted for Monday’s assault of a 65 year-old Asian female, at 360 West 43rd St, was arrested and charged with Felony Assault as a Hate Crime,” the NYPD tweeted.
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Nonaction from bystanders
After the video of the attack made the rounds on Tuesday, public outrage was prompted when footage showed a security guard in a nearby building watching the attack unfold and doing nothing to help. Instead, the man appeared to close the door to the building.
“I don’t care who you are, I don’t care what you do, you’ve got to help your fellow New Yorker,” said Mayor Bill de Blasio (D-N.Y.), calling the bystanders’ actions “absolutely unacceptable.”
The Brodsky Organization, which manages the building, said in a statement Tuesday that it was suspending staff members who witnessed the attack “pending an investigation by their union.”
The attack was one of two on Asian Americans in New York that were caught on video that day, intensifying calls for an end to anti-Asian hate crimes in the city as well as the rest of the country. Anti-Asian hate crimes have received increased attention since the series of March 16 shootings in the Atlanta metro area, in which six of the eight victims were Asian women.
Rep. Grace Meng (D-N.Y.), who was among the officials calling for an end to anti-Asian hate crimes at a meeting in Brooklyn on Monday, said the video reinforced a profound lack of empathy for Asian Americans.
“We’ve gone from being invisible to being seen as sub-human,” Meng tweeted. “We just want to be seen as American like everyone else.”
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