Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has dropped assault charges for beating a homeless man after his Chinatown landlord was attacked by a vagrant with a weapon. And the landlord now claims Mr. Bragg should never have filed the lawsuit in the first place.
Brian Chin, 32, a psychology graduate student and professor at Harvard University, chased an unidentified homeless man in late August when he hit him with a piece of wood with nails driven into it.
Mr. Bragg's office initially filed a felony assault charge against the married father, but dropped the charges last week, taking Mr. Chin out of legal reach, but said he was angry about having to deal with the court process in the first place. Ta.
“I feel more angry than relieved because this should never have happened,” Chin told the Post.
“I was treated like a violent perpetrator in the eyes of the law, and for five months I had a never-ending waking nightmare…I spent years in prison even though I had committed no crime. Every day I woke up, I thought, “I'm going to spend a lot of time there.''
“This is a case that should never have been brought in the first place,” Chin said, adding that he had to resign from his teaching position because he could no longer pass a background check.
“What was this for? It completely changed my life, everything I had spent decades working on.”
Chin's troubles began on Aug. 24 at around 8:30 p.m. when he found a vagrant lying on the ground outside a subway station at Christie Street and Grand Street in Manhattan.
According to the criminal complaint, Chin allegedly kicked the unidentified man three times while wearing black gloves.
Tramp was awakened, but after the encounter, he and Chin went their separate ways.
However, the two returned a few minutes later, and Chin said he had returned because he was haunted by the brutal murder of his tenant, Christina Yuna Lee, two years ago.
“Especially after a murder, if someone is violent, I like to stand by the front door and make sure no one is followed and all the tenants are safe.” said Chin.
The homeless man actually became violent, breaking a wooden chair and swinging a block of wood with nails driven into it at Chin, who pushed him down and punched him six times before the assailant quit.
When police arrived, the unidentified man struggled to his feet, blood gushing from his face, according to the complaint. As he tried to stand up, he fell backwards and hit his head on the railing of the subway station.
Authorities rushed him to Bellevue Hospital with facial and skull fractures, according to the complaint. He was then intubated and placed on a ventilator.
Chin said she recognized the man as a panhandler from Grand Street and approached him because she wanted to make sure he was okay.
“There are so many drug overdoses and deaths and just about every horror you can imagine,” he said. “Soon after that he woke up and started screaming.”
Chin tried to calm the man down, but said he feared for his life during the fight, adding: “I just wanted to go home to my wife and children.”
“I feel terrible,” Chin said afterward. “I don't want anyone to get hurt.”
The charges could have carried the landlord up to seven years in prison, but they stuck with Bragg until he decided to stop pursuing them.
“It is our job to thoroughly investigate and prosecute acts of violence, including incidents of alleged assault,” a representative from the Manhattan prosecutor's office said Sunday.
“This case was dismissed and, as a result, sealed by the court.”
But that's of little consolation to Chin. Chin said he believed it was “personally abhorrent that this case was brought.” Especially since the homeless man was later charged with intimidation.
“From the beginning, with such abundant evidence, it was clear that I was the victim, not the perpetrator,” Chin said. “Instead of doing the right thing, he used his office to pursue a case against me for almost five months.”
“When you think about this, it begs the question: how many other innocent people has he imprisoned? Those who were attacked on their own property and weren’t lucky enough to have access to exonerating surveillance footage? How many people are there?
He compared himself to Jose Alba, a famous bodega worker who was charged with murder after stabbing an assailant inside his store, but the charges were eventually dropped in the face of public outrage.
“How many more victims, like José Albas and like me, will there be before the politicians who have been shielding him wake up to the fact that this is not how justice is done in this world?” How much more should we put the case in his hands?” The state? “
“That’s not what New Yorkers deserve.”
His attorney, Kenneth Gilbert, agreed, saying prosecutors saved themselves by dropping the case before seeing the inside of the courtroom.
“If it had gone to trial, it would have been embarrassing for prosecutors,” Gilbert said.
“I think it would have been an embarrassing situation for Alvin Bragg.”
