A 75-year-old Asian woman defended herself when she was attacked in San Francisco, California, On Wednesday morning and sent his assailant to the hospital. The fact was the last of one wave of aggression and other crimes against the Asians in the Bay Area in recent months.
KPIX-TV, a CBS-owned and operated television station licensed by St. Francis, spoke with the woman named Xiao Zhen Xie, accompanied by her daughter Dong-Mei Li.
“She’s still very traumatized, very scared and one eye is still bleeding,” Li told KPIX 5. “From the right eye she still can’t see anything and she’s still bleeding and we have something to absorb the bleeding.”
Xie, who has resided in San Francisco for 26 years, she said she was quite shocked by the unprovoked attack. At this point, his instinct was to fight.
also reads: Biden, concerned about violence against people of Asian descent
A witness to the incident was KPIX sporting director Dennis O’Donnell, who appeared on the scene during his morning run. In a video he captured with his cell phone, Xie is seen with an injury to the side of his face and eye and holding an ice pack in his face. Police said both Xie and her assailant were taken to a hospital for treatment.
Through his daughter, Xie told KPIX that he was waiting to cross the street at the traffic light when the suspect punched him in the left eye. Immediately, his instincts were activated to defend himself. While he suffered injuries and required medical attention, it was his assailant who ended up on the stretcher. “He found a stick around the area and defended himself,” Li explained.
He told her that his mother could not see anything with his left eye and he could not eat. The hope is that time will heal the physical and emotional wounds, but her family said the incident left her scared for her life. “As you can see, she is extremely terrified,” Xie’s grandson, John Chen, told KPIX in May. “She’s terrified even to leave.”
Xie’s family has created a GoFundMe account to help her with her medical expenses. St. Francis police said they are investigating the aggravated assault. The suspect, Steven Jenkins, 39, was arrested Thursday.
also reads: Suspect of shootings at Asian spas in Atlanta acted for “sexual addiction”
There was a second victim Wednesday morning: an 83-year-old Vietnamese man named Ngoc Pham. Pham continued to recover from his injuries on Thursday, which included a broken nose. The St. Francis Community Youth Center created a fundraising page on GoFundMe for Pham to raise money to pay for medical costs.
Police did not disclose the reason for Jenkins’ attack and said it was unclear if the victim’s race had anything to do with it. “We have to do our job and investigate these cases with all available resources and we need to make arrests, and we have done that,” San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said Wednesday. Both the police chief and the mayor highlighted the arrests made in connection with previous attacks on the city. “We need to understand, not just what is happening, but why these attacks are happening,” Mayor London Breed said. “Because in some cases they didn’t include any theft or robbery.”
Hate crimes against Asian Americans increased by 150% in 2020, even when hate crimes in general declined. In January, a 91-year-old man was thrown to the ground in Oakland’s Chinatown. An assault in San Francisco killed 94-year-old Vichar Ratanapakdee, while another assault left Pak Ho, 75, dead in Oakland last week.
Just this week, the Southeast Asian community United States report an increase in the racist violence i hate crimes, As he traverses the sadness and consternation of a massacre in and around Atlanta that left eight dead.
also reads: Yesterday’s cartoon, classified today as “inappropriate”
Flower offerings were arranged on foot from the massage parlors in which Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old white man, opened fire on Tuesday and killed eight people, most of them Asian women.
“White supremacy is killing us, literally,” Stephanie Cho, executive director of the NGO Asian Americans Advancing Justice in Atlanta, denounced Wednesday.
“Violence against Asian communities has gone unnoticed … for many years,” he added, strongly rejecting the aggressor’s statements about the alleged motive for the massacre.
jabf / lsm