Assembly Member Jenifer Rajkumar addresses racial hate assault on city bus

 

NY Daily News 

A white woman riding a Queens MTA bus was bashed in the head during a confrontation with three Black passengers who told her they “hate white people,” police sources Thursday.

The incident is being investigated by the NYPD’s Hate Crime Task Force.

The 57-year-old victim was riding a Q53 bus in Woodhaven when she got into an argument with three Black women or girls about 6:50 p.m. Saturday.

As the exchange heated up, one of the women hit the victim over the head with a blunt object, leaving her bleeding from the head, police said.

“I hate white people...the way they talk,” the victim recalled her attackers saying, police sources said.

The assailants rushed off the bus at Woodhaven Blvd. and Jamaica Ave.. They ran off and have not been caught.

Another Sikh person got mugged on the street by a Gurdwara

 

 PIX News

 A mom of three cried Tuesday as she described being attacked when she left her temple in Queens.

A group of three stole her jewelry and threatened her with a gun. She didn’t wan her face shown because she’s scared for her life. The attack on her is the fifth one against Sikh individuals that PIX11 has reported on since April.

The attack comes comes as the Asian American Bar Association released a report revealing overall hate crimes in New York City have spiked. Activists say they want more done to protect Asian American New Yorkers.

The mom who was attacked agreed. For right now, she’s hoping the people who robbed her are caught and see justice.

NYPD investigators said the robbery doesn’t appear to be a hate crime, but that could change as the investigation continues. They’re still looking for surveillance video and witnesses.

Return to the South Richmond Hill Horror

 

Impunity City 

Spring in South Queens is off to a despairingly dangerous start, particularly with targeted muggings of elderly Indian Sikh men in the same vicinity that’s located on Lefferts Blvd near a Guawdara Temple one block west. First was a violent assault on a 70-year-old man going on an early morning stroll and a little over a week later two other elderly Sikh men were mugged and robbed by two men on the same corner around the same time. In both incidents, the criminals knocked their turbans  religious headwear off their heads, giving credence to Sikh community leaders theories of being hate crimes against them.

 

The two men involved in the brutal attacks eventually got arrested after being on the lam for a few weeks, one of them who was involved in both crimes. Yet something caught my eye from the Queens Chronicle report after the young man involved in the second attack:

Two Sikh men were attacked Tuesday morning in Richmond Hill near where a hate crime against a member of the same community occurred last week. One man is in custody and another is still at large.

The incident occurred near the intersection of 95th Avenue and Lefferts Boulevard just after 7 a.m., according to police, a block from the Sikh Cultural Society gurdwara.

Officers found the two men, 76 and 64 years old, with minor injuries to the head and body. A preliminary investigation determined that the victims were approached by two men who struck them both on the head and body with closed fists and a wooden stick. The victims were taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center.

The assailants removed religious headwear from the men and stole their money. The incident is being treated as a robbery and a hate crime, according to police.

Hezekiah Coleman, 20 years old, who police say was squatting at 95-54 Lefferts Blvd., was taken into custody and charged with robbery, assault, hate crimes and aggravated harassment, officials said.

Police believe the suspect they have not caught also committed last week’s assault against Nirmal Singh, 70, said Community Affairs Officer Scott Adelman of the 102nd Precinct at the Community Board 9 meeting on Tuesday night.

The 102nd has a directed post at 95-54 Lefferts Blvd., which appears to be abandoned. It is believed that both suspects were squatters there.

“That car will not leave until the perpetrator is caught,” said Adelman.

Sukhjinder Singh Nijjar is the chairman of external affairs and the elections commission at the Sikh Cultural Society. He says the society is working with the precinct and hate crimes unit in the aftermath of the attacks.

He hopes to see increased police presence and is working to get a car permanently assigned for the temple area. On Wednesday, he and a group of about 15 community members met at the temple at 3 a.m. to patrol.

“We’re exploring all these avenues to see if we can have this area covered, not only for our local Sikh community, but also many other multicultural communities in this area,” he said, adding that the society will continue to hold elected officials accountable on delivering on their promises.

Strong words indeed, especially to elected officials who continue to remain insouciant to the rapid rise of crime in Queens and the other four boroughs and most of all to the party all the time mayor Eric Adams. But in the case they should hold the Queens Chronicle accountable for getting the address of the house were the suspects were squatting in (twice in the same article). The actual address is 94-54 Lefferts Blvd, and  this house has a sordid past and currently is casting an ominous aura. I covered this house exactly one year ago right after a man was found dead on the porch one morning, a result of being bludgeoned in the head by two other homeless men.

Evidently, this abandoned house has got even worse and more squatters are occupying it even if they can’t get inside. 

 

 

 

Chairperson of hate crimes task force trashes bail reform laws

 

Eyewitness News 

Recidivist criminal lunatic assaulted an Asian cop because he knew he would get off

  

NY Post

 The man charged with trying to shove an Asian undercover cop onto Queens subway tracks was cut loose without bail Sunday — as the judge claimed, “My hands are tied.”

Suspect Ricardo Hernandez, 32 — who faces three hate-crime charges in the attack on the unnamed cop on a Long Island City train platform around 5:30 p.m. Saturday — has at least 12 prior arrests under his belt.

At Hernandez’s arraignment over the attempted push onto the tracks, Queens Supreme Court Justice Louis Nock said the state’s bail-reform measures barred him from holding Hernandez in jail.

“My hands are tied because under the new bail rules, I have absolutely no authority or power to set bail on this defendant for this alleged offense,” the judge said.

Under the new measures passed last year, attacks that cause no injury are exempt from bail in New York.

The judge also agreed with Hernandez’s lawyer to dismiss a warrant against the suspect involving a previous open-container summons. The suspect had had a can of Coors Light beer.

A police source said Hernandez was previously arrested for possession of a controlled substance in 2019 and turnstile jumping in 2016 and 2017 and has nine other sealed arrests on his record.

Meanwhile, his alleged cop assault came after another previous attack this month on an Asian undercover officer — in which the suspect also was almost immediately freed.

Hernandez, who lives near the subway station where the latest attempted shove took place, told The Post as he left court, “I don’t want to talk about this.”

According to police, Hernandez confronted the undercover cop on the N train platform at 31st Street and 39th Avenue in Dutch Kills and tried to shove him onto the tracks.

“That’s why you people are getting beat up,” Hernandez allegedly snarled. "I got nothing to lose."

“I will f–k you up!” Hernandez added, according to cops. “This is my house.”

The bail reform law is not progressive. And de Blasio's and Shea's plan to catch Asian hate crime in the act is a disaster.

 

Man who kicked and stomped a 65-year-old Asian woman served time for killing his mother and lived in a nearby hotel shelter

 

 

NY Daily News

 An elderly woman walking through Hells Kitchen became the latest victim of an unprovoked anti-Asian attack, in a brutal, caught-on-video assault.

Cops have charged a man out on parole for killing his mother with the caught-on-video stomping of a 65-year-old Asian woman outside a luxury Manhattan building, a hate crime that shocked the city, officials said Tuesday.

Brandon Elliot, 38, was charged with assault as a hate crime and other charges at 1:10 a.m. Wednesday after cops received numerous Crime Stoppers tips, authorities said.

“This was a horrific, horrific attack,” NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea told PIX11 Wednesday. “(The victim) has very significant injuries and she has a long recovery ahead of her.”

In 2002 Elliot, then 19, was arrested for fatally stabbing his mother three times in the chest in front of his sister, who was 5, in the Bronx. He was convicted of murder and sentenced to 15 years to life in prison.

He was released on supervised release and lifetime parole just 16 months ago.

Elliot was nabbed for the hate crime at the Four Points by Sheraton, a hotel-turned-homeless-shelter on W. 40th St. — just a few blocks from where he allegedly attacked his victim, according to cops. Elliot has been living at the hotel, which the city has been using to house homeless men.

de Blasio funds the tone police

 

City Journal

Amid a staggering wave of gun violence in New York City, with shootings this year measuring 42 percent higher than the same period in 2020, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced that he plans to deploy the NYPD to track down and question people who have expressed “hate,” albeit without committing any crime or violation.

Speaking to reporters about anti-Asian attacks that have occurred around the country, the mayor encouraged people who have “witnessed or experienced any act of hate” to report it. “Even if something is not a criminal case,” the mayor explained, “a perpetrator being confronted by the city, whether it’s NYPD or another agency, and being told that what they’ve done was very hurtful to another person and could if ever repeated, lead to criminal charges, that’s another important piece of the puzzle.”

Asked how the NYPD would confront someone who has done something “hateful” but committed no crime, de Blasio enlarged on his prescription. “One of the things officers are trained to do is to give warnings,” he said. “If someone has done something wrong, but not rising to a criminal level, it’s perfectly appropriate for an NYPD officer to talk to them to say that was not appropriate. . . . I assure you if an NYPD officer calls you or shows up at your door to ask about something that you did, that makes people think twice.”

The mayor did not go into detail about the kind of behavior he was talking about, but we can surmise—since he explicitly stated that it wouldn’t rise to the level of criminality—that it must involve speech. Racial slurs or negative references to racial or ethnic identity, while nasty and rightfully unacceptable in civil society, are generally not prosecutable. Promising to involve the police in pursuing people who make intemperate, obnoxious remarks seems like an odd way to prioritize public-safety concerns.

The idea of a special category of “hateful” crime violates good sense. If a crime is a crime, sufficient mechanisms already exist to prosecute and punish offenders. What makes beating someone up “hatefully” worse than beating them up . . . lovably? The point of hate crimes as a category is to express how especially heinous society finds crimes motivated by ideologies of bias like racism, anti-Semitism, or homophobia. To this extent, hate crimes legislation essentially creates a class of political crime.

Does this mean the NYPD will respond for hate speech like "I'm going to rape you", "Gimme your cellphone or I'll stick you" or "Shoot that motherfucker"

 

And so it begins...

I found disturbing footage of chair throwing & assault on Chassidic Jew Tue on Albany & Lincoln. Victim is uncomfortable reporting due to the discovery reform (attacker may know his identity). Same group assaulted someone later that night on Union Kingston. @NYPD77Pct @NYPD71Pct pic.twitter.com/f5jEAL5SkR

— Yaacov Behrman (@ChabadLubavitch) December 31, 2019

From the Daily News:

An Orthodox Jewish man was assaulted by seven creeps in Brooklyn, but didn’t report the crime because he’s worried about the new criminal justice reforms, a Jewish activist said Tuesday.

Buks claim Forest Hills arsons are hate crimes

From the Times Ledger:

The Bukharian Jewish Center of Forest Hills is calling a series of fires throughout Forest Hills a hate crime and is offering $50,000 reward for tips after the latest suspected arson hit the home of a rabbi early Sunday morning.

A police spokeswoman said the investigation was ongoing and that the NYPD could not confirm whether the arsons are a hate crime yet.

The house burned in the most recent incident belongs to Rabbi Valman Zvulunov, the director of the Bukharian Jewish Center’s Yeshiva, who lives in Maspeth.

At an emergency meeting convened by an ad hoc committee of leaders from the Bukharian Jewish Center Sunday morning, Zvulunov received a call about his house being burned at about 2 a.m., he said, noting that in the last incident, someone set a small fire to a doorway and the Fire Department had put it out.

Rafael Nektalov, editor and publisher of the Bukharian Times, a weekly newspaper, said every victim is a member of the Bukharian community, noting that if the incident had occurred in Russia or France, “there would have been headlines about fires in the Jewish quarter.”

Aron Borukhov, a lawyer who spoke on behalf of the ad hoc committee, who is also part of the committee, suggested that cops put a patrol at every construction site and 360-degree-view cameras at every intersection.

He explained that because there is a permit posted at construction sites showing who the owner is, the arsonist knows who owns the houses.

“It (fires) has been only the Jewish community,” he said. “Nobody else. We can only make conclusions from what we have seen.”

These sites most likely are targets because they are unguarded at night. An arsonist is not going to light an occupied house on fire. A posted permit generally lists the name of the contractor that applied for it, not the owner of the house. And if you can afford to build a mansion, you should be able to afford a night watchman to protect it.

UPDATE: The biker has been ruled out as a suspect.

Cars vandalized with swastikas in Bellrose

From CBS New York:

Residents of the Bellerose section of Queens woke up Friday to find messages of hate scrawled around their neighborhood.

Swastikas marked many cars, a fence, and a garage, CBS 2′s Tamara Leitner reported.

Carolyn Lyew said her blue Toyota was covered in swastikas near the corner of 87th Avenue and 256th Street.

“I’m just hoping it’s kids in the neighborhood who are not aware because anything else is unconscionable,” she said.

Mad bomber in Jamaica

From Fox 5:

Police on Monday released surveillance video of a suspect in a string of possible bias-related firebombings in Queens on New Year's Day and announced $12,000 in reward money for information leading to his arrest and conviction.

One clip shows the arsonist tossing a lit Molotov cocktail that spilled its flaming contents onto the lawn in front of a home at 88-20 170th St. that also houses a Hindu temple.

Cops say the firebug is also behind similar attacks that took place at the Al-Khoei Benevolent Foundation Islamic center, the 179th Street Deli and a home at 146-62 107th Ave.

All of the incidents took place between about 8pm and 10:15pm on Sunday.

No one was injured, but the 107th Avenue home caught fire and was badly damaged.

Nassau County police are also investigating a similar incident in which a bottle filled with gasoline was thrown at a house on Glafil Street in Elmont around 9:40pm on Sunday.

The suspect in the Queens cases was described as a black man between 25 and 30 years old, about 5 feet 8 inches and weighing 200 pounds.

When last seen, he was wearing a black jacket and baseball cap, and he fled the scene in a light-colored, four-door sedan.

Police were looking into whether the fires were hate crimes.

Woodhaven gang attack a hate crime

From the Daily News:

The beating death of a teen at a Queens party by a pack of brutes screaming anti-gay slurs is being investigated as a hate crime, police said Tuesday.

Anthony Collao, 18, a recent high school graduate from Long Island died Monday at Jamaica Hospital after being taken off life support, cops said.

He was beaten "within an inch of his life," after being chased down Saturday night outside the Woodhaven birthday celebration by a pack of party crashers, police said.

The five suspects forced their way into the party - which was advertised on Facebook - and refused to pay a $7 cover charge.

Once inside the house - an abandoned home on 90th St. with no electricity - they began busting windows and picking fights, witnesses said.

The teens also flashed gang signs, yelled slurs and scrawled epithets in red marker on the walls, said the two party hosts.

[NYPD Commissioner Ray] Kelly said there were roughly 45 people at the party, including the five suspects.

Cops quickly caught up to four of the suspects - Alex Velez, 16, of the Bronx, and Nolis Ogando, Christopher Lozada and Luis Tabales, all 17 and from Queens - arresting them soon after the incident.

Lozada was caught wearing the victim's Atlanta Braves baseball cap, and the others were covered in blood, sources said.

And a 5th suspect was arrested after posting about the attack on Facebook.

Dromm wastes police manpower on frivolous complaint

From the Queens Courier:

Dromm himself was recently a victim of an alleged hate crime. Two weeks ago, an angry caller, who was upset about Dromm’s editorial supporting building the Mosque near Ground Zero, left a voicemail at his district office calling him “Mr. or Mrs. Dromm.” The police are investigating the incident as aggravated harassment.

Remember this next time you make a 911 call to report a felony in progress and the cops don't show up for several hours. Apparently they have time to investigate someone expressing their first amendment right to freedom of speech to an elected official.

Danny, if you can't take the political heat, stay out of office. "Mr. or Mrs." should be the worst thing you are ever called. Now let me stop typing before I get charged with a hate crime...

Swastikas may be result of landlord-tenant dispute

From the Queens Chronicle:

A dispute between a landlord and tenant in Howard Beach has turned ugly.

A property owner in Lindenwood said a former tenant who owed more than $22,000 in back rent trashed his old apartment on 83rd Street after the landlord finally kicked him out.

In addition to the property damage, disturbing images of swastikas, Ku Klux Klan symbols and various profanities were spray painted on many walls in the apartment.

“It’s disgusting,” said the landlord, Vincent, who didn’t want his last name used for fear of privacy concerns for his family. “I hope the authorities pursue this as a hate crime.”

The landlord, who is of Romanian Jewish descent, said he believes a former tenant, John Liveri, whom he has clashed with on several occasions over the past year, is responsible.

Earlier this year, Liveri called police and claimed Vincent punched him, and then had a restraining order taken out against the landlord.

Although charges against him were dropped, Vincent said he was still put through the ignominy of being arrested.

Though that issue was eventually resolved after Vincent was cleared of any wrongdoing, he continued to have issues with the tenant not paying rent.

The property owner said he finally kicked him out after not paying rent for eight months. He is not aware where his former tenant is currently living.

However, Vincent believes he wanted revenge and is responsible for the property damage at the apartment, which included a destroyed hot water heater and cracks in walls that appeared to be caused by a hammer, along with the racial images.

Police at the 106th Precinct are investigating the case as a burglary, though no arrests have been made yet. Police would not confirm whether a warrant was issued for Liveri’s arrest.

Two suspects nabbed in College Point hate crime

From the Daily News:

A shocking video shows a gay man trying in vain to fend off two thugs who repeatedly punch and stomp him on a deserted Queens street.

Jack Price, 49, tries again and again to get to his feet and escape, only to have the cowards knock him back down in their brutal onslaught, the footage shows.

Two men have been arrested in the beatdown.

Daniel Aleman, 26, was nabbed Sunday night, and Daniel Rodriguez, 21, was captured Tuesday night in Norfolk, Va., police said.