They come in the wake of an alleged attack on the subway on Friday, in which an eyewitness said the Asian victim was beaten simply for being who she was.
One of Sunday’s alleged attacks left a 54-year-old Asian woman hospitalized, a police spokesman said. She was approached on the Lower East Side by a man who hit her in the face with a metal object, police said.
Elias Guerrero, 38, has already been arrested and preliminarily charged with assault as a hate crime, according to the NYPD spokesman. Guerrero has not been formally charged by the public prosecutor and it is unclear whether prosecutors will pursue a hate crime charge.
In another incident, a woman allegedly grabbed a 41-year-old Asian woman from behind and threw her on the floor, shouting at her in Spanish, a police spokesman said.
The police arrested Patricia Melendez, 37, accusing her of assault, disorderly conduct and harassment. The incident is being investigated as a possible “bias” crime, said an NYPD spokesman.
It is not clear whether Guerrero or Melendez has a lawyer. CNN’s attempts to contact them or their families have been unsuccessful.
The NYPD said it is investigating a third incident in which a 37-year-old woman was on her way to an anti-Asian violence protest when a man – who has not yet been identified – allegedly took his protest sign and, after trying to place it it in a dumpster, threw it on the floor and stepped on it.
A statement from the New York Police Department said that when the woman asked the man why he did this, he allegedly punched her in the face twice and ran away.
Subway attack allegedly included hateful words
The three incidents came after an attack on Friday in which a 68-year-old Asian man was hit on a subway in an unprovoked attack, according to authorities.
According to the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, the assailant sucker punched the man hard enough for the victim to lose consciousness and suffer a laceration in the head that required medical treatment.
The victim remains in critical but stable condition, according to the NYPD.
Marc Mathieu faces charges of second-degree assault and was prosecuted on Monday, prosecutors said. Although Detective Hubert Reyes said Mathieu was preliminarily accused of “assault as a hate crime”, prosecutors are still investigating whether the case is a hate crime, the prosecution said.
CNN contacted Mathieu’s lawyer, James McQueeney, for comment.
Witness George Okrepkie told CNN that he “still can’t get over it.”
“I am a 9/11 survivor … I have lived through some difficult times,” he said. “I have been working in the city for 30 years. I have seen people being mugged, beaten, but most of them are crimes of a monetary or passionate nature. This is the first time I have seen someone attack someone for who they were.”
Witness shocked by attacks
Okrepkie said the victim, the assailant and he were the only people in the subway car. Okrepie was sitting in front of the victim when the attacker appeared with a rolled-up object, called the victim “Chinese m * therf ** king” and repeatedly hit him on the head, the witness said.
“I just saw you, who was in shock and, at the end of the day, was almost 60, but told me he was 170,” said Okrepkie. “He didn’t know where he was, so I took off my scarf and made a tourniquet to stop the bleeding.”
After taking care of the man’s injuries, Okrepkie took pictures of the bloodied man before paramedics came to take care of him.
“I took both pictures because it is a current event and people don’t seem to think how real it is,” he said. “These photos express exactly what is going on.”
Okrepkie said he later learned that the man is from Sri Lanka, but regardless of the man’s specific ethnicity, he said it was a sad comment about a diaspora that he said was “part of what (New York City) does”.
“I’m just afraid that, just like an ordinary guy walking down the street, calling things that aren’t – ‘Kung Flu, Chinese virus’ – marginal people start to act,” he said. “This is what you get (as a result).
“I’m scared,” said Okrepkie. “If I were Asian, I would be afraid.”
Mayor condemns attacks on Asian Americans
Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a news conference on Monday that there will continue to be an increase in the NYPD’s presence in Asian communities across the city.
De Blasio called the incidents “unacceptable” and encouraged New Yorkers to report them.
“The way to defeat hate is to recognize and denounce it,” de Blasio said.
Anti-Asian hate crimes more than doubled during the pandemic, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.
The alleged incidents came after last week’s shootings in the Atlanta area in three spas and beauty salons. The shooting left eight people dead, six of whom were Asian American women.
CNN’s Laura Ly and Mirna Alsharif contributed to this report.