Authorities said police in New York City arrested Jarrod Powell, the man accused of beating a 61-year-old Asian man late last week in East Harlem.
Powell, 49, was arrested Tuesday morning and charged with attempted murder and two counts of assault as a hate crime, the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force said.
Powell was arrested days after the police department released security surveillance video of the Friday attack, in which a man is seen throwing Chinese immigrant Ma Yao Pan to the ground before repeatedly stomping on his head and then walking away.
Ma’s family said he has been in a medically induced coma and on a ventilator at a New York hospital since the attack.
State Assemblyman Ron Kim with other politicians and community leaders, including Ma’s family and their attorneys, gathered Tuesday afternoon at the site of the attack to collectively call for hate directed at Asians to stop.
“As New Yorkers, we shouldn’t tolerate it,” Kim said. “We come here to say, stop targeting, scapegoating and killing Asian Americans.”
Ma was attacked amid an increase of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders being the targets of hate incidents.
Stop AAPI Hate, a group that tracks and responds to hate incidents against this demographic, released a report stating between March 19, 2020, and Feb. 28 it had received 3,795 reports of anti-Asian hate incidents nationwide, including incidents of physical assault, verbal harassment and discrimination.
Another report from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University published last month found anti-Asian hate crime in 16 of the United States’ largest cities had increased by 149% in 2020 compared to a year earlier with New York City experiencing a surge of 833%.
Following Ma’s attack on Friday, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he was “sickened to learn of yet another bigoted act of violence against an Asian American man.”
“This is not who we are as New Yorkers, and we will not let these cowardly acts of hate against members of our New York family intimidate us,” he said in a statement. “We stand united with the Asian American community, which has always been an important part of our diverse identity as a state.”
*story by UPI
