Doormen who stood by after attack on Asian woman are fired
The lobby staff members who closed the door to a Manhattan apartment building last week without taking immediate action after a Filipino American woman was brutally attacked on the street outside have been fired, the building ’s owners told residents in an email on Tuesday.
Rick Mason, the executive director of management at the Brodsky Organization, which owns the luxury apartment building in Midtown, told residents of all of the organization’s buildings in an email that two doormen who were inside the building at the time had not followed “required emergency and safety protocols.”
He did not identify the doormen, and a spokeswoman for the union that represents them did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The attack on the woman, Vilma Kari, 65, last Monday, video of which quickly went viral, was one of a wave of assaults over the past year that have caused mounting fear and anxiety among Asian Americans in New York and across the country.
The first video of the attack on
Kari was 25 seconds long, and ended with the building staff members appearing to stand by passively while she was lying on the ground injured, with one of them moving only to close the door. The staff members’ visible response to watch without helping added to the outrage that greeted the release of the video, which appeared to show an episode of random, unprovoked violence punctuated by a callous, uncaring response.
Brandon Elliot, 38, was arrested after the attack, and the Manhattan district attorney’s office charged him with three counts of assault as a hate crime.