Just circling back on this one. As I lamented at the tail-end of that post, the frustrating thing about witnessing that attack on Saturday afternoon, is that I’ll probably never get the whole story. The middle-aged victim (I should probably come up with another name of him) purportedly lives on my street, somewhere. I actually saw one of my fellow “good Samaritans” just yesterday, but he looked to be in a hurry, so I didn’t engage.
A doorman in my building, meanwhile, said he and the super took a look at the video from the security camera aimed at the down-sloping driveway adjacent to my building where the maroon-hooded assailant sprang out of. By his account, the video shows the attacker sitting with his back against the westerly-wall, sort of readying himself, the narrative being, then, that his target wasn’t chosen so much as simply the unlucky person who was next to be walking by. According to my doorman, maroon-hooded assailant guy went right for the middle-aged victim’s bag, so it does look to have been an attempted robbery (and not just a random attack without clear motive). My doorman also feels that the reason the middle-aged guy got beaten so badly was because he was trying to simply hold on to his bag, as opposed to letting the guy have it or dropping it and fighting back. His arms were engaged by trying to keep his belongings and, thus, could not cover his face or punch back. I’m more inclined to suggest that he was probably just in complete shock that it was happening that he didn’t know how to react, but whatever.
Thus far, I have yet to learn any further details about the status of either the victim or the assailant.
At the risk of being coy, I should point out that all this happened on East 9th Street between Broadway and University Place, a comparatively sleepy stretch of predominantly residential buildings, bookended by Knickerbocker’s Bar & Grill at the western end and a Bean coffee shop at the eastern end.
Vaguely related, here’s a birds-eye view of the westerly portion at University Place looking north. This was shot in 1939 by one Marion Post Wolcott and evidently appears in the book “Around Washington Square” by Luther Harris. Suffice to say, it looks pretty different today.
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