NEW YORK (NYTIMES) - A 35-year-old woman was stabbed to death inside her lower Manhattan apartment early Sunday (Feb 13) by a man who had followed her from the street and into her building, police said.
The woman, whom police identified as Ms Christina Yuna Lee, was the latest person of Asian descent injured or killed in a string of random attacks in New York City, many of them committed by people who were mentally ill.
Surveillance video obtained by the New York Post shows Ms Lee being trailed to her building on Chrystie Street in Chinatown by a man who catches the door behind her and follows her inside. In the video, Ms Lee enters the building vestibule just before 4.30am and walks down the hallway and out of the camera’s view as the man, identified by police officials as Assamad Nash, 25, trails her.
Neighbours called police a short time later about a disturbance, police said, and when they got to the building, the door to Ms Lee’s apartment was locked.
When Emergency Service Unit officers broke into the apartment, police officials said, she was found dead in her bathtub. Nash tried unsuccessfully to escape out of a back window, police said. He was arrested inside the apartment, they said. He had cuts and lacerations and was taken to Bellevue Hospital.
Nash has a history of misdemeanor arrests, court records show, including an incident in September in Grand Street station, near the building where the killing occurred, when a 62-year man told police that Nash had punched him in the face after the man swiped his MetroCard for another passenger.
Though police have not yet called the killing a hate crime, attacks against Asian Americans have been on the rise since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Last December, the Police Department reported that such attacks were up 361 per cent from the previous year. Last month, Ms Michelle Alyssa Go, a 40-year-old Asian-American woman, was pushed to her death while waiting for a southbound train at Times Square.
Last week, Mr Jarrod Powell, 50, was charged with second-degree murder as a hate crime in the death of Chinese immigrant Yao Pan Ma, 61, who died on Dec 31 from injuries he suffered in an East Harlem attack in April.
In the latest attack, police officials said it does not appear that Ms Lee knew her attacker or had any prior contact with him before he followed her home.
She lived in a six-storey walk-up apartment block near the Grand Street subway station. As snow fell on Sunday afternoon, police guarded the building, allowing only residents and detectives to enter.
Mr Andrew Oaks, 30, who lives in the building, said he was awake at 4.30am when he heard screams that “sounded like something out of a movie". He added that he “thought nothing of it", until he heard banging on the door and police began questioning residents later in the morning.
In a Twitter post on Sunday afternoon, Mayor Eric Adams called the stabbing horrific, saying “we stand with our Asian community today".
“While the suspect who committed this heinous act is now in custody, the conditions that created him remain,” Mr Adams said in an official statement shortly after his Twitter post. “The mission of this administration is clear: We won’t let this violence go unchecked.”
Manhattan borough president Mark Levine gathered with Asian American leaders on Sunday and called on the city to fix what he called a “broken mental health system".
He said on Twitter: "We have to address the real fear in Chinatown and beyond.”
Mr Wellington Chen, the executive director of the Chinatown Business Improvement District/Partnership, said the stabbing was the latest tragedy in a neighbourhood that has suffered profoundly during the pandemic.
“How many blows can one community take?” he said, adding: “There’s not a vaccine for the anti-Asian hate."
