Vic tells of gang beat
Random attack on Halloween left him blind in one eye
A Brooklyn man left blinded in one eye after a vicious caught-oncamera Halloween attack could only guess why he was targeted.
“It must’ve been a case of mistaken identity,” the visibly-shaken victim told the Daily News, a day after he was released from the hospital. “I had a mask on, like everybody else during COVID-19.”
“It was Halloween night and everybody was out there acting crazy,” he said, sporting a bloodred left eye. He declined to share his name for fear of retaliation.
The 38-year-old victim said he was minding his own business as he walked down Mother Gaston
Blvd. near Broadway on Oct. 31 when nearly a dozen people began chasing him.
“Somebody screamed out I had a gun and they attacked me,” he recalled. “They were all over me. I don’t know any of these people. I don’t walk around with any weapons. I don’t bother nobody.”
Surveillance cameras caught the rest of the 9:30 p.m. beatdown in disturbing detail.
The video shows a group shoving the victim to the ground, with one suspect in a tan jacket stomping on him.
The clip then cuts to the victim lying in the middle of the crosswalk on Broadway as at least two more people punch and kick him before running off.
The injured man was taken to Brookdale University Hospital, but doctors couldn’t repair all the damage.
“He lost that left eye,” the victim’s mother, a civilian employee for the city’s Correction Department, told The News. She also wished not to be identified.
“The doctors worked on it, but they couldn’t save it,” she said. ”
Her son is still trying to come to grips with the loss of his eye.
“He’s just trying to deal with it. It’s his first day home,” the mother said. She believes the beating was linked to gang activity in the area.
“If you know anything about gangs it was Halloween night. Halloween is initiation night. His attack was an initiation. My son has never had anything to do with gangs,” she said.
No arrests have been made. “We want these people caught We definitely don’t want this to happen to anybody else,” the