NY Police said in the early hours of Wednesday morning that a parolee convicted of killing his mother nearly two decades ago was arrested on charges, including a felony assault as a hate crime, in an attack on an Asian-American woman in New York City.
Police said Brandon Elliott, 38, was the man seen in surveillance video kicking and trampling the woman near Times Square on Monday. They said Elliott was living in a hotel that served as a homeless shelter several blocks from the scene of the attack. He was arrested at the hotel around midnight. Police said that the public’s tips led to his arrest.
Elliott was found guilty of stabbing his mother to death in the Bronx in 2002, when he was 19 years old. He was released in 2019 and is under surveillance for life. The parole board denied his release twice. His record also included an arrest for theft in the year 2000.
“When you release people from prison and put them in homeless shelters, you’re looking at potential trouble,” New York Police Commissioner Dermot Shea told the press. “There has to be a safety net and there must be resources for it.… He just shakes his head and says,“ What could go wrong? ”And this is the mistake. That should never happen.
Police said Elliott, who is black, is facing charges of assault as a hate crime, attempted assault as a hate crime, and assault and attempted assault in Monday’s attack. It was not immediately known if he had a lawyer who could speak on his behalf. It was expected to be video-streamed on Wednesday.
The victim’s daughter told the press her mother is Vilma Kari, a 65-year-old woman who immigrated from the Philippines. The newspaper did not name Kari’s daughter.
The Philippine ambassador to the United States, Jose Manuel Romualdez, said the victim was a Philippine-American.
The country’s foreign minister, Teodoro Locsin Jr., condemned the attack on Twitter.
“This has been taken seriously, and it will affect the foreign policy of the Philippines,” he wrote, without explaining how this was being done.
“I could say that too, so no one on the other side could say,“ We didn’t know that the ethnic brutality against the Filipinos was taken seriously, ”Locsin said.
Kari was on her way to church in midtown Manhattan when police said a man had kicked her in the stomach, knocked her down, stepped on her face, shouted insults at Asians and said, “You don’t belong here,” before walking away as spectators watched.
A hospital spokesman said that she was discharged from the hospital on Tuesday after receiving treatment for serious injuries.
Monday’s attack, one of the latest nationwide in a spike in hate crimes against Asians, sparked widespread condemnation and concerns about bystanders not participating. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio described the attack as “absolutely disgusting and outrageous” and said it was “absolutely unacceptable” for witnesses not to help the woman.
The attack came just weeks after a mass shooting in Atlanta that killed eight, six of them women of Asian descent, and just days after the threat of a 65-year-old Asian American woman in the same neighborhood in Midtown Manhattan and her county. With anti-Asians insults.
The escalation in violence has been partly linked to the erroneous blame of the coronavirus pandemic and former President Donald Trump’s use of terms such as “Chinese virus”.
The attack occurred Monday morning in front of a luxury apartment block in Hell’s Kitchen, a predominantly white neighborhood west of Times Square. Two workers inside the building who were security guards were seen in a video clip who saw the attack but did not come to help the woman. One of them was seen closing the door of the building while the woman was on the ground.
The building management company said it was suspended pending investigation. The trade union said they called for help immediately.
Residents of the building defended the workers on Wednesday with a letter addressed to the management company and the media. They claimed that a video clip focused on the suspect and the assaulter, “unfortunately, was shortened to inadvertently exclude the remedial action.
