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On Monday night around 6 p.m., an unidentified woman was brutally attacked outside a liquor store in Harlem by a group of three male suspects. After turning down their advances and trying to leave, the woman was chased, battered, and robbed by her attackers.
On West 128th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, the incident began when one of the men (who is seen wearing a red parka in surveillance footage) offered to pay for the 31-year-old mother’s wine. According to the woman’s account, which she shared with CBS2’s Lisa Rozner, after she declined the man’s offer, the attacker seemingly felt snubbed.
“I politely declined,” the woman explained, “and I said ‘No thank you, but thank you. I can pay for it myself.'”
As she gathered her things and got ready to leave the store, the victim told Rozner that the man in the red parka “basically said that he felt like I thought I was better than them.”
CBS2 reported that after leaving the store, the men “followed her out” while repeatedly asking what she wanted to do about the situation.
“I just asked him, I said, ‘You’re seriously trying to fight me? I’m trying to go about my business,'” she recalled saying to the attacker in red.
After that, the woman says she was chased across the street. As surveillance footage confirms, when the group reached her, they beat her, kicked her, and one man bit her forehead in what she thinks was an attempt to “bite her eye out,” CBS2 said.
“To bite me, and do that,” the woman shared, “maul me the way that he did – with me screaming, and saying I’m just trying to get my daughter. That – that’s an animal. That’s not a person.”
Further, when the woman’s phone dropped to the ground amidst the attack, she claims “He pried the phone out my hand, and he said give me your phone b*tch.”
Reportedly after the attack, someone told the woman to run away because one of the suspects had been seen committing the same crime in the past. Despite witnesses calling 9-1-1 and the woman being taken to NYC Health + Hospitals/Harlem in stable condition after she was assaulted, the bite on her forehead was so bad that the news source detailed it “leaving a deep wound” on the victim, who can no longer open that eye.
In a similar violent crime, after spurning his advances, a female victim was hit in the face with a skateboard by a Harlem man last June.
Authorities are still looking for the suspects involved in this week’s incident. Anyone with any information is asked to call NYPD Crime Stoppers at (800) 577-TIPS
