Up next
Author

This brutal attack happened in Yonkers, NY last Friday. It started when 42-year-old Tammel Esco directed a racial slur at a 67-year-old Asian woman as she was walking home with a grocery cart. She ignored him and entered the front doors into a small vestibule and then pulled out her keys to unlock the inner door. Esco then entered and hit her in the back of the head, knocking her to the ground. Surveillance video shows he then leaned over her and punched her in the head 125 times. After more than a minute of throwing punches he then stood up and stomped on her face with his foot several times and spit on her.

Amazingly, the victim survived the assault, though with serious injuries.

“This is one of the most appalling attacks I have ever seen,” John J. Mueller, the Yonkers police commissioner, said in a statement. “To beat a helpless woman is despicable, and targeting her because of her race makes it more so.”

The woman, whose name was not released, sustained broken bones in her face, bleeding on the brain and numerous cuts and bruises on her head and face, officials said. She was hospitalized in stable condition on Monday, Yonkers police officials said.

Esco, who lives in the same apartment building as the victim, was arrested outside after a bystander who saw the assault taking place called police. He’s been charged with attempted murder and it’s being treated as a hate crime. He has a long criminal history including multiple violent felonies.

Esco has spent time in prison for assault and criminal sale of a controlled substance. He has also been arrested 14 times and currently holds seven felonies, including three violent crimes, Yonkers police said.

He also served time in prison from May 2011 to October 2013. His post-release supervision expired in 2018, according to state records.

The career criminal also pushed a woman through a salon’s glass window in February 2021. He was only given a conditional discharge and did not go to jail for the assault. He also served 42 months in prison for a 2010 stabbing.

The mayor of Yonkers condemned the attack on Twitter.

AG Letitia James did as well.

And Gov. Kathy Hochul.

This is only the latest in a string of violent attacks on Asian people in New York. Last month, Steven Zajonc was charged with (allegedly) assaulting 7 Asian women in a two-hour spree.

The first attack took place at about 6:30 p.m. on Sunday around East 30th Street and Madison Avenue, about a half-mile southeast of the library, when an assailant approached a 57-year-old woman and, without uttering a word, punched her in the face, the police said. Ten minutes later and a block west, the nightmare repeated itself. The second victim was 25.

The attacks all followed the same template as he made his way south. The next two victims, punched in the face just minutes apart, were also in their early 20s. At 7:05 p.m., a 19-year-old was elbowed in the face at Union Square. Twenty minutes later, the man was on East Houston Street near Mott Street, where he elbowed another woman in the mouth.

Two other Asian women have been murdered in recent months in New York. Christina Yuna Lee was followed into her home by a deranged man who stabbed her to death as she screamed for help. Neighbors called police but they were unable to get into her apartment because she has a steel front door. And in January Michelle Go was pushed onto the Subway tracks in front of a train by a homeless drug addict with mental problems.

Source: