SAN FRANCISCO – Tired of being stuck during the pandemic, Vicha Ratanapakdee was impatient for her regular morning walk. He washed his face, put on a baseball cap and a face mask and told his wife that he would drink the coffee she had prepared for him when he returned. Then, on a misty and misty winter morning in Northern California last month, he left.
About an hour later, Mr. Vicha, an 84-year-old retired auditor from Thailand, was violently knocked to the ground by a man who charged at him at full speed. It was the kind of heavy body blow that could have knocked a young football player unconscious with full protective pads. For Mr. Vicha, who was 1.52 m tall and weighed 113 pounds, the attack was fatal. He died of cerebral hemorrhage in a San Francisco hospital two days later.
Captured by a neighbor’s security camera, the video of the attack was watched in horror around the world. Among Asian Americans, many of whom endured racist insults, complaints and worse during the coronavirus pandemic, the death of a helpless elderly man became a rallying cry.
Last year, researchers and activist groups recorded thousands of racist incidents against Asian Americans, a wave of hatred that they associate to former President Donald J. Trump referring repeatedly to the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus”. Mr. Vicha’s family described his murder as racially motivated and this spurred a campaign to raise awareness among many prominent Asian Americans, who used the online hashtags #JusticeForVicha and #StopAsianHate.
“Vicha’s murder was as clear as the day,” said Will Lex Ham, a New York-based actor, who after watching the video flew from New York to San Francisco to help lead protests and security patrols in Asian neighborhoods. . “There was no way to ignore the violence that was happening to people who looked like us.”
Antoine Watson, a 19-year-old resident of neighboring Daly City, was arrested two days after the attack and charged with murder and abuse of the elderly. He pleaded not guilty, but his lawyer admits that his client had a “rage.”
Chesa Boudin, the district attorney for San Francisco, says Vicha’s death was heinous. But he says there is no evidence to suggest that he was motivated by racial animus.
Yet, at a time when demands for racial justice have shaken a nation in demographic change, Mr. Vicha’s assassination was notable for the galvanizing anger it brought to a diverse group that includes Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, South Asians and the Southeast. Asia’s heritage. The murder of a Thai in America gave voice to a united community under the protection of an Asian-American identity.
In the weeks since it happened, Mr. Vicha’s death has become a symbol of the vulnerability that many in the Asian American community feel right now.
For his family, the death was devastating in California and abroad. In Thailand, the murder was front-page news and described as barbaric, a life interrupted in a family where brothers live until the late 90s, relatives say.
Since his retirement in 1996 from Kasikornbank, one of Thailand’s largest financial institutions, Mr. Vicha has traveled between San Francisco, where his eldest daughter lives, and Thailand, where the youngest lives.
For months, Vicha longed to return to Thailand, but failed because of the pandemic. He did not like San Francisco’s cold, wet winter and missed his favorite dishes from southern Thailand and his family and friends.
Her brother, Surachai Ratanapakdee, 89, now the only surviving brother of eight children, remembers Mr. Vicha as a scholar and curious about the world outside the rice fields, watermelon fields and orchards on the family farm.
“Vicha was one of the few people in the village who spoke English well,” said Surachai.
Mr. Vicha went on to study at Thammasat University in Bangkok, one of the most prestigious institutions in the country.
His eldest daughter, Monthanus, described her father as a devout Buddhist. She remains puzzled that, on the morning of the attack, he left without his Buddhist amulet, a protective talisman that he always wore around his neck.
When Ms. Monthanus expressed her desire to pursue graduate studies two decades ago, Mr. Vicha supported his decision to enroll at the University of California, Berkeley business school. After graduation, when Mrs. Monthanus got married and decided to stay in San Francisco, Mr. Vicha and his wife came to help raise their grandchildren.
At the time of the attack, Mr. Vicha was only a few months away from being able to return to Thailand. On January 15, he received his first injection of the Moderna vaccine.
“We said, ‘Dad, let’s go back soon!’”, Recalled Monthanus.
Vicha’s second shot was scheduled for February 12, an appointment he would not live to make.
His death occurred at a time when other disturbing images and reports were emerging from San Francisco Bay. Three days later, an attacker threw a 91-year-old man in Chinatown, Oakland, another video that spread over the Internet.
This older victim was mistakenly described in many news stories as Asian. The court documents name the victim Gilbert Diaz, and Carl Chan, a community leader and president of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, said the victim was Latin. But Chan says he has accounted for more than two dozen attacks on Asian-American victims in Chinatown, including two others pushed by the attacker who brought Diaz down.
Criminal data from the district attorney’s offices in San Francisco County and Alameda County, which includes Oakland, show that people of Asian descent were less likely last year to be victims of crime than other ethnic groups. In San Francisco, where 36 percent of the population is of Asian descent, 16 percent of victims of crimes of known ethnicity were Asian, a situation similar to that of Alameda County.
But Bay Area Asian community leaders say crime statistics are misleading because Asian-American residents, especially immigrants, often do not report burglaries or robberies because they are suspicious of the system or language barriers. What is indisputable, say leaders of the Asian-American community across the country, is that the pandemic has created a climate of fear and a feeling of insecurity from New York to California. Last week, the California Legislature approved $ 1.4 million in funding to track and research racist incidents against Asian Americans.
“Our elderly people are afraid to walk the streets themselves,” said Chan.
Last year, Vicha’s daughter Monthanus was approached twice on the street by people who told her to leave the country because, assailants said, Asians had caused the coronavirus.
Watson’s lawyer, Sliman Nawabi, a public defender, said his client would not be able to identify Vicha’s ethnicity through his face mask, cap and winter clothes. Mr. Nawabi described Mr. Watson as someone who fought rabies.
In the hours before the attack, Mr. Watson had a series of setbacks. He left his home because of a family dispute and suffered a traffic accident in San Francisco at 2 am. He was quoted by the San Francisco police for passing a stop sign and reckless driving and then slept in his car that night.
That morning, several security cameras in the area captured Watson hitting a car with his hand, according to Boudin, the public prosecutor.
“It looks like the defendant had a kind of tantrum,” said Boudin.
It was then that Mr. Vicha went up Avenida Anzavista, a street overlooking the skyscrapers of the city’s financial district.
A witness told the officers that Mr. Watson said something like “What are you looking at?” A security camera located inside a neighbor’s apartment captured Mr. Watson crossing the sidewalk towards Mr. Vicha, who briefly turned to the attacker before the impact.
Two days after the attack, Mrs. Monthanus and her mother went to the place where Mr. Vicha was killed and saw that his blood still stained the pavement. They scrubbed the sidewalk with brushes and wondered why no one in town had come to do the same.
Mr. Vicha’s cremated remains were placed in two urns. Ms. Monthanus says that she and her family will rent a boat under the Golden Gate Bridge and spread out across the Pacific Ocean.
“I want him to be close to me,” she said. “When we go to the beach we can dream that he is with us.”
She plans to bring the other urn back to her father’s hometown in southern Thailand, where the local Buddhist temple has a stupa that holds the family’s remains. “Your brothers and sisters are there,” said Monthanus. “They will all be together.”
The amulet, a precious family heirloom, will be passed on to the next generation, Monthanus said.
“He always told me that if something happened to him, it should be passed on to his grandchildren,” she said.
Poypiti Amatatham contributed reporting from Bangkok.