In yet another attack on vulnerable members of the Asian community in the Bay Area and in the United States, two elderly people were attacked on Wednesday morning on Market Street, leaving both hospitalized.
But one of the victims, a 75-year-old Chinese woman whose identity has yet to be clarified, successfully fought against her alleged attacker. She hit him several times with a stick she held, KPIX reported, and later he had to be carried on a stretcher by paramedics. The elderly woman had bruises and swelling on her face.
KPIX reporter Dennis O’Donnell recorded footage of the scene on Market Street and Charles J. Brenham Place – where the woman, in tears, screams at her attacker. “You bum, why did you hit me?” she asked him in Chinese, while he was being pulled out.
She was leaning against a street lamp, she said, when the 39-year-old man threw several punches at her before being arrested by a security guard nearby, police said.
“This bum hit me,” she said to a crowd of onlookers.
She was the second victim that day to be attacked by the suspect, police said. An 83-year-old Asian man was first assaulted by the man, police said, and was also hospitalized.
Nearly half an hour before the attack, police told SFGATE in a statement that he was involved in a fight at UN Plaza.
“Investigators are working to determine whether prejudice was a motivating factor in the incident,” a police spokesman told SFGATE in a statement.
The random attack comes a day after a series of shots believed to have been carried out by a 21-year-old man in three massage parlors in Atlanta, leaving at least eight dead, six of whom are Asian women. In the bay area, a litany of attackers is targeting elderly Asians – leaving several dead and many afraid of being outdoors. Last week, Pak Ho, a 75-year-old man in Oakland, died after a robbery in which he suffered brain damage.
That attack came less than 48 hours after Danilo Yu Chang, a 59-year-old Filipino Chinese man, was beaten and unconscious.
Stop AAPI Hate released its hate crime statistics on Tuesday; the majority of reported victims were women.
Editor’s note: This story was updated on March 17 at 4:20 pm to correct the victim’s age to 75.