BASHED ON HER WAY TO FIGHT HATE
Asian punched in East Village was headed to anti-bias protest
It’s a sign of the times.
A woman on her way to a massive Manhattan protest against anti-Asian violence became the victim of a hate crime herself when she was punched and bloodied by a man who stomped her sign calling for peace, police said Monday.
Police arrested Erick Deolivera, 27, charging him with assault and criminal mischief as a hate crime in the cruel attack.
“I feel unsafe at the moment, and I’m very surprised it happened to me as well,” the victim, who suffered a split lip, told the Daily News. “That means this kind of incident is happening commonly right now . ... It’s racism. It should be getting better.”
The 37-year-old
Midtown accountant was on Astor Place in the East Village when a stranger asked for her sign, which read, “Hate Has No Peace,” about 11:35 a.m. on Sunday, police said.
Protesters were flooding into rallies in Union Square Park and Columbus Park in Chinatown, as shown on the front page of Monday’s Daily News.
“This man was trying to ask for the sign nicely. I said ‘OK, you can have it,’ ” said the woman, who asked that her name not be published out of concern for her safety. “I thought he was going to the protest. He took the sign and started to destroy it and tried to put it in the trash can.”
The man then threw the sign on the ground and stomped on it.
“I said, ‘What are you doing?” And he just come up and punched me twice — once on the right side near my mouth and the other is near my left eye,” she said.
As he ran off, she gave chase but sprained her ankle. She was able to record cell phone video showing the suspect’s bearded face before he covered it with a mask.
“I don’t think he said anything. I think I yelled at him, shouting, ‘He punched me!’ ” she said. “I chased him trying to grab him. I wanted to fight back. I did fight back a little bit, I was pushing him in his head and he ran away to the subway.”
The suspect, dressed in a Nike baseball cap, a red Chicago Bulls jersey and jeans and carrying a green backpack, can be seen in the video she took turning back and saying something before he escaped into the Astor Place subway station.
Cops collared Deolivera by late Monday.
The victim was treated at
Lenox Health Greenwich Village for a cut lip from the punches as well as her sprained ankle.
The woman came to the U.S. from China for college at the University of Southern California. She graduated, then moved to Hong Kong for work. She moved to New York City in 2012.
Her 7-year-old daughter is here in New York with her while her husband is in China. “He was very angry as well, but he can see that this happens very often and we should protect ourselves,” the woman said of her husband.
The attack, under investigation by the NYPD Hate Crime Task Force, is the latest in a string of assaults against Asian people across the city.
Just five hours hours later and a mile away, a 54-year-old woman was slammed in the face with a metal pipe by a stranger on the street in Chinatown who yelled, “I came here to f—- up Asians,” police said.
Ming Liang was walking home from the grocery store when the bigot screamed the crazed threat and bashed her with the pipe near Grand St. and Ludlow St. about 4:45 p.m. on Sunday. The victim was left with a cut across her nose that needed stitches.
Cops arrested Elias Guerrero, 38, a short time later not far from the scene. He was charged with assault as a hate crime, resisting arrest, harassment and weapon possession.
Through Sunday, there have been 22 bias attacks on Asians in the city this year compared with zero by the same point last year, cops said. During all of 2020, there were 29 anti-Asian bias attacks, according to NYPD stats.
Also this year, there have been two coronavirus-related hate crimes, one involving an Asian victim. Last year at this time, all seven such victims were Asian.
Last week, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said he believes bias crimes against Asians are greatly underreported, and he urged victims to come forward.
“Be they speech, harassment or violent crime, if someone did this to you, they are probably doing it to someone else, too,” Shea said on PIX11.
The attacks have been fueled by racism and false blame for the coronavirus pandemic, advocates believe.
Six of the eight victims who died in last week’s shootings at three different spas in northwest Georgia were Asian women. Some activists and elected officials have pushed for confessed shooter Robert Long, 21, to be charged with hate crimes for the attacks, but he has denied race was a motive.
On Monday night, the Guardian Angels announced it is boosting patrols in Brooklyn.
“We’ve been watching attacks occur since the lockdown, way back in March, and obviously we need to step up,” founder Curtis Sliwa said at a news conference in Manhattan’s Chinatown. “We need citizens to get involved and protect the Asian neighbors and relatives, and most importantly we are prepared to help Asians with their own personal self-defense so that they’re not being constantly being victimized.”
Sliwa said the group now has “a dozen” Angels on Eighth Ave. in Borough Park, in addition to those in Manhattan and in Flushing, Queens.