Asian lady fights off attacker on San Francisco avenue | Bay Space
A 76-year-old Chinese woman who stood up against a man who beat her on a street corner in downtown San Francisco said the unprovoked attack scared and traumatized her. Her alleged attacker was arrested on Thursday.
Xiao Zhen Zie told KPIX-TV in a tearful interview that she was waiting to cross a downtown street on Wednesday when a 39-year-old man hit her without warning and for no reason, one of several recent attacks on elderly Asian Americans in the bay area.
Speaking in her native Taishan dialect, translated by her daughter, Zie said she responded instinctively by repeatedly hitting the man with a wooden stick.
A KPIX-TV employee videotaped the aftermath of the attack after stumbling across the scene during his morning run. On the video, Zie howls as she puts an ice pack on her injured eye. The video shows the attacker on a stretcher, blood dripping from his mouth.
“Very traumatized, very scared, and that eye is still bleeding,” the woman’s daughter, Dong-Mei Li, told the ward when describing her mother’s injuries. “The right eye still can’t see anything.”
Zei’s grandson, John Chen, said the attack frightened his grandmother to leave her home.
Police said suspect Steven Jenkins attacked an 83-year-old Vietnamese man in the same area just before attacking Zie. A security guard was chasing Jenkins after attacking the man and when he escaped he hit Zie, Officer Adam Lobsinger said in a statement.
The guard held Jenkins until officers arrived.
The elderly man, Ngoc Pham, fell and suffered cuts and bruises on his head, and fractures to his nose and possibly his neck, said Ben Mok, manager of the San Francisco Community Youth Center, which set up an online fundraiser to help Pham’s recovery. Mok said doctors rated the severity of Pham’s neck injury.
After Jenkins was hospitalized for an unrelated illness, he was taken to jail and booked on an investigation into assault and mistreatment of the elderly, Lobsinger said.
Investigators are trying to determine whether racial prejudice was a factor in the attacks. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Jenkins had a lawyer to speak on his behalf.
Police stepped up patrols in Asian neighborhoods after six Asian women and two other people were killed in the recent wave of violence in the San Francisco Bay Area in Georgia.
The attacks have sparked new fears among members of the Asian-American community, who have become increasingly victims of harassment and violence since the coronavirus spread to the United States last year.
