Police in New York are looking for a female suspect after she bludgeoned an Asian woman with a hammer in an unprovoked attack, the NYPD said.
The 31-year-old victim, who only wanted to be identified as Theresa, was walking with a friend in Midtown on Sunday night — when they were approached by an unnamed woman near West 42nd Street and Ninth Avenue.
Police say Theresa did not know her assailant, and the suspect told her to take off her mask before striking her with the hammer, cutting her on the side of her head.
She and her friend managed to disarm the suspect, and the hammer was recovered at the scene.
“She was talking to herself, like talking to a wall, I thought maybe she was drunk or something, so we just wanted to pass through her quickly and when I passed through her, she saw us and said ‘Take off your f#####g mask,’ which is shocking,” Theresa told ABC New York. “Suddenly I felt my head get hit by something.”
She was rushed to a nearby hospital and was said to be in stable condition. She suffered a gash in her forehead and a deep wound on the left side of her head.
Theresa, who moved to New York in 2019 for her master’s at the Fashion Institute of Technology, now plans to move back to Taiwan with her parents.
“My mom actually told me, ‘Please be careful, there’s a lot of Asian crime happening in America,'” she told ABC7.
The incident is being investigated as a hate crime.