A Sri Lankan immigrant attacked on a train in Manhattan last week was the victim of an anti-Asian attack, an eyewitness told The Post on Sunday.
Straphanger George Okrepkie, 56, said he was sitting opposite 68-year-old victim Narayange Bodhi on Friday afternoon when a man wearing a fedora approached the elderly rider and spit out, “You Asian king!” and hit him.
“Suddenly the man sat on top of the older man and made a stabbing motion, just hit him over the head,” Okrepkie said. Within seconds, the blood was everywhere [victim]
The attacker jumped off the man. I tried to grab [the attacker]I couldn’t. The doors were already opening and he rolled outside the train. I turned my attention to the victim and made a tourniquet for him to keep the blood from getting out of his head, ”said Okrepkie – who used his new Burberry scarf to stop the bleeding.
The attacker escaped when the train stopped at Franklin Street station, the witness said.
Okrepkie captured Bodhi’s bloody face in a photo that has since gone viral.
“I did take a picture just because I wanted to make sure we could remember what was really going on,” he said of the attack and other attacks on Asian-Americans. “These are not people who are tripped or pushed or pushed [receiving] racial insults – people get hurt dramatically. “
An NYPD representative told The Post on Sunday that the department has no evidence that the attack was racially motivated.
But Okrepkie, who said he stayed with the victim for 15 minutes until the police and police arrived, told The Post, “I don’t know what to do to call it a hate crime.
“I think Asian people are getting rid of these days, and they are such a big part of our city. It’s a huge group of people. They are Vietnamese, they are Chinese, they are from Korea, Japan. This [attacker] I didn’t care where the man was from. [The victim] just looked Asian. “
New York City is experiencing a wave of attacks on people of Asian descent. There were 28 such racially motivated attacks last year, compared to just two in 2019.
Bodhi could not be reached for comment by The Post.
Additional reporting by Tina Moore