An arrest has finally been made in an anti-Asian attack on a group of New York City men speaking Cantonese last November.
Police captured Isaiah Jordan, a 30-year-old Black man, on Tuesday. In an email, the New York City Police Department told The Daily Beast that he faces hate crime, assault, aggravated harassment, criminal possession of a weapon, and menacing charges.
According to a police report, Jordan mocked a group of men speaking Cantonese when they walked past him on Nov. 2, 2021. One of the men confronted him about it, and Jordan allegedly punched the 56-year-old man in the face. The police report says Jordan taunted the men with a knife before spraying them with an unknown substance. The suspect left the scene, and the victims were hospitalized for minor injuries.
Surveillance footage of the incident shows a Black man in a gray hoodie with two Asian American men. The men say something that appears to upset the man in the gray sweatshirt, and he turns around and throws an object toward four Asian American men. The men begin to walk inside a building, when the man in the gray sweatshirt approaches them and shoots what appears to be pepper spray in their direction.
The arrest comes after a woman allegedly attacked four Asian American women with pepper spray over the weekend in New York City, ABC7 New York reported. According to the victims, the woman hurled a slew of racial comments, telling the women, “Go back to where you came from.”
Anti-Asian hate crimes have been on the rise throughout the country in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. On Saturday, two men allegedly dropped a cement block on a Bay Area politician’s head while he was hiking with his family.
“This big concrete block landed on my head, and I instantly fell to the ground,” Millbrae City Councilmember Anders Fung told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Fung needed metal stitches in order to clamp his scalp back together after the assault.
In March 2020, a man confessed to attempting to murder three Asian Americans in Texas because he thought the family was infecting people with the coronavirus.
Since the pandemic started through December 2021, nearly 11,000 anti-Asian hate crimes had been reported, according to Stop AAPI Hate.