Arrest, hate crime charges filed in attack on Asian American woman
NEW YORK
Local authorities said Wednesday they have filed three felony hate-crime charges against 38-year-old Brandon Elliot in the brutal stomping of an elderly Asian American woman — a case that could test the efficacy of such statutes amid a national groundswell of concern over rising anti-Asian attacks.
Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said Elliot — a homeless Black man on parole after serving 17 years in prison for killing his mother — told 65-yearold Vilma Kari “you don’t belong here” before launching the unprovoked attack in Midtown on Monday. Elliot faces two counts of second-degree assault and one count of attempted first-degree assault that could carry a maximum sentence of 25 years, as well as other punishments for violating his parole, authorities said.
The beating was captured on lobby surveillance video from a condominium, which showed several onlookers failing to respond to Kari’s distress. One closed the lobby door as she lay just outside on the pavement.
“This brave woman belongs here. Asian American New Yorkers belong here. Everyone belongs here,” Vance said at a news conference. “Attacks against Asian American New Yorkers are attacks against all New Yorkers. Our office stands against hate in all its forms.”
The assault caused widespread outrage as another in a rash of high-profile attacks on people of Asian descent, including the mass shooting in Atlanta that killed six female Asian workers and two others in
March, and an assault, also captured on video, that killed an elderly Thai immigrant in San Francisco in February. The alleged assailants in those cases have not been charged with hate crimes, illustrating the complexities surrounding how such cases are handled.
Vance and New York
City Police Commissioner Dermot Shea hailed the quick work of the police department’s hate-crimes investigative unit in Elliot’s case, saying it demonstrated the commitment of the city’s law enforcement leadership to stopping such attacks. Vance said his office has prosecuted four hate-crime cases and is actively investigating four others in the first three months of this year, after having brought nine cases in all of 2020.
“Let me reiterate that we will never accept or tolerate hate or violence of any kind in our great city,” Shea said. “It goes against every fiber of who we are.”
The Midtown case was one of two attacks on Asian Americans in New York that were caught on video and publicized Monday, the other involving an Asian man who was choked and left unconscious in an altercation with a man on a subway car.
The charges against
Elliot came a day after the Biden administration announced steps to respond to mounting pressure from Asian American leaders, including an expedited 30-day internal review at the Justice Department aimed at bolstering the federal agency’s tracking and prosecutions of hate crimes and bias incidents.
Other measures included reinstating a White House initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and allocating nearly $50 million in new grants at the Department of Health and