Sib’s cry as vid shows savage beatdown
The relentless attacker started by pummeling his ex-girlfriend with both fists, then kicked her repeatedly in the head — and finally bashed the helpless victim unconscious with a nail-studded wooden plank.
A security camera captured the near-fatal assault in Queens on Victoria Chuminski by her domineering exboyfriend, a savage beatdown where the victim lost several teeth and her vision in one eye, officials charged.
Spurned boyfriend James Fitzgerald, his hands soaked with the victim’s blood, was arrested Saturday as he fled the scene.
Chuminski, 35, was still fighting for her life Tuesday at a Queens hospital.
“She’s not doing great,” said the victim’s emotional sister Shirley Mapes. “She really needs our prayers right now.”
The video, viewed by the Daily News, shows the attack outside Haifa Smoked Fish on 150th St. in Jamaica started as the 53-year-old Fitzgerald and his estranged girlfriend began an animated argument while walking past the business’ brick warehouse.
Fitzgerald suddenly slams Chuminski against the wall as he unleashes a flurry of punches to her head, with the overmatched victim unable to fend off the fusillade of blows.
Chuminski falls to the sidewalk and seeks refuge by crawling beneath a parked delivery van, only for Fitzgerald to drag her out and continue the assault. He begins kicking her repeatedly before grabbing the battered victim’s pocketbook off the sidewalk and slamming it into her face.
Fitzgerald wanders down the block, where he finds the nail-covered 2-by-4 plank, and returns to hammer her nearly a dozen times as the blood begins running down the victim’s face. A passerby found Chuminski and called for help, with medics and police soon arriving at the gore-spattered scene.
When workers at the fish company came in for their
Sunday shifts, the van was covered in the victim’s blood.
A second sister, Tenika Chuminski, said she met Fitzgerald when the victim brought him to her home for a Christmas party five months ago. She said the couple also appeared at her home in late March, looking for a place to stay before Victoria landed a job as a housekeeper.
“He seemed to just follow her,” said Tenika. “She actually wanted to stay here for a few days, which I agreed. But then he wanted to stay too and I wasn’t comfortable with that.”
It was the last time the sisters ever saw one another. Victoria said she and Fitzgerald would head to a homeless shelter.
“[She] said that she knew they would help her get back on her feet,” Tenika recalled. “We sent her off with something to eat for both of them, and face masks and hand sanitizer.”
Fitzgerald was charged with attempted murder, assault and criminal possession of a weapon and remains held without bail for the attack.
Chuminski, who was brought unconscious to Jamaica Hospital, underwent two facial surgeries and suffered permanent disfigurement in the attack.
The bones in her face were crushed by the beating, and she suffered puncture wounds from the nails along with an assortment of cuts.
Victoria was homeless after losing the New Jersey apartment where she and Fitzgerald had lived through the fall and winter after meeting in a drug rehab facility last year. The relationship soon soured over his obsessive behavior — with him stalking her when she tried to break things off, according to a friend of the victim.
“She’s just full of life and friendly to everyone she meets,” Mapes said of the victim.
Victoria’s half sister Nicole Chuminski is serving two life sentences for murder in Massachusetts for killing two young sisters when she torched the Boston home of their mom, whom she was romantically involved with, after a spat at a family wedding in 2008.