A teenage girl allegedly slugged an Asian woman riding a Manhattan subway train with her family last week and attacked a witness who was recording her behavior in what police are investigating as a possible hate crime.
The still-at-large teen was sitting with two other young girls aboard a southbound F train before she allegedly launched the assaults as the train was approaching the West 4th Street station around 8 p.m. Thursday, according to police and a report.
The trio of girls were shouting and cursing at the family before one allegedly pulled the hair of the 51-year-old mom, punched her repeatedly and made an “anti-ethnic remark” towards the victim, who is Asian, police said.
The apparent aggressor also allegedly punched a straphanger, Joanna Lin, who pulled out her phone to record the tumultuous scene, according to the footage Lin later posted to Instagram.
“I’m in shock & still at a loss for words except for what I documented on the reel,” Lin captioned the video. “I’ll be ok, just a bit sore on the head and tailbone.”
The other woman, Sue Young, told CBS New York that the violence started when the three teenagers began laughing and pointing at her, her husband and their 11-year-old twin daughters.
“It was just insult, after insult, after insult. And, finally, my husband felt like he needed to step in and so he was like, ‘Can you use some better words besides those?’” Young told the station.
That only enraged the teens and they began threatening the mom and shouting at the family who were visiting from Nevada, according to the video.
The girls then realized they were being recorded by Lin and that’s when the teen whom police are looking for stormed over and allegedly pummeled her.
“She ran over, grabbed me by the hair, threw me on the ground and started punching me several times,” Lin told CBS.
Young said she couldn’t watch Lin being attacked without doing something to help so she got up to push the teen off Lin and that’s when the same girl began punching her, the outlet reported.
“My glasses got broken. I’ve had headache for a couple of days now because my hair was pulled and so my scalp was very tender. I got like a whiplashy neck,” Young said.
The mom also suffered two large bruises to her arm, which she showed to ABC 7 in a video interview.
“You just go into survival mode, and you just want to protect yourself,” Young told ABC.
Other travelers on the train were able to stop the girls from inflicting further violence and the family and Lin got off at the next station, where they called police.
The NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force is investigating.
Young told CBS that she’d like to talk to the girls to try to resolve the issue so that her daughters can learn from their frightening experience.
“I want everyone to see that we can bridge this, that maybe there’s good in those girls,” she said.” And I want something positive to come out, instead of just throwing them in jail.”
While police are investigating the assault as a potential hate crime over some of the teens’ torments, the victims told ABC they don’t think the attack was racially motivated though they still want there to be accountability.
“We don’t know what battles other people have in their lives, but I can imagine they’re probably not as privileged,” Sue Young’s husband told the station. “That probably has a lot to do with their outlook on the world and the anger they may have.”
