A Chinatown landlord accused of brutally beating an armed homeless man is being hailed as a hero by locals who say the city’s lax crime policies have turned the area into a lawless zone.
Manhattan building owner Brian Chin, 32, who was an enthusiastic anti-crime voice when a homeless man killed one of his building’s tenants in 2022, has been charged with felony assault in Saturday’s attack that left a homeless man with serious injuries.
“Brian’s a great guy. He’s kind of an activist and leader in our community and he wants to clean up our area,” said the homeowner, who has owned a building on Christie Street, near where the incident happened, for more than 40 years.
“he [local Sarah Roosevelt] “Children’s parks should be used for what they are meant to be, not as places for open-air drug sales or for homeless people to sleep on benches,” a source told The Washington Post on Monday.
“And we’re very grateful for that.”
Sources suggested that left-leaning City Council policies, such as those aimed at giving early release to incarcerated defendants and making it harder for police to stop and search suspects, were to blame for the unrest that was threatening quality of life.
“Everything that Broken Windows solved has been undone. Now it’s like the Wild West,” the man said, lamenting the loss of a law enforcement strategy of prosecuting small crimes to prevent bigger ones in the future.
Shirley Wu, an insurance broker, works a floor above the Grand Street subway entrance where Saturday’s attack took place, next door to Chin’s building where two years ago Christina Yuna Lee, 35, was stabbed to death by homeless man Asamad Nash during a promiscuous sexual assault and robbery.
“Because of what happened to Christina Lee, people around here are scared of homeless people,” Wu told The Post.
“After Christina was killed, we installed an intercom so people don’t ring the doorbell unless they know who it is. We never locked the downstairs door before, but now it’s always locked.”
“I don’t know what caused it. [Saturday’s] “Brian was responsible for the attacks on homeless people, but if he was involved in those attacks, it’s understandable that he would be angry at the homeless after what happened to Christina,” Wu said.
“Sometimes the police or aid groups come and take them to a shelter, but they always come back the next day,” she said.On the corner of Grand and Christy streets, two visibly homeless men were clinking Dunkin’ Donuts cups and begging for coins.
The homeless man Chin allegedly attacked was sleeping on the sidewalk at Christie and Grand streets when Chin kicked him three times and told officers he had been harassing people for a while, authorities and law enforcement sources said.
Minutes later, the two got into an argument and the homeless man broke a chair and hit Chin with a piece of it, which had a nail protruding from it, the video shows.
The video shows Chin throwing the man to the ground, punching him repeatedly in the head and kicking him.
Chin was charged with assault and released without bail on Sunday. Chin and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.
Police sources said the vagrant had no identification, was intubated and cannot yet be identified, but would be charged with intimidation once his identity is known.
Landlord sources told The Post that some of the area’s homeless are engaged in shoplifting and harassing residents to get money to buy drugs.
“We have a big fence problem, we have vagrants shoplifting and selling at the Target across the street. [the swiped goods]” the source said.
“So now we have this cycle of everything being independent… and the police can’t do anything because all of this is decriminalized.
“Christina Lee was one of Brian’s tenants. It’s caused PTSD for all of us. It’s made us look over our shoulders,” the source added. Some of the homeless “are going into hardware stores and stealing. They’re going into light bulb stores and breaking things. They’re trying to intimidate.”
“If we don’t give them a dollar, they go crazy. … This is America and it’s like some third world country is better than us,” the homeowner said.
As for Chin, meanwhile, “with Christie, if there’s anything out of the ordinary, he always tries to get rid of people,” the source said.
“Most of the time, it works,” the man said, “but when the vagrants need money, they go back to the subway. And unfortunately, being near the subway every day, he sees the worst of it, because his tenants have to go there.”
“When you call the police they don’t do anything. Local authorities have a lot to do with this.”
“We are all alone.”
— Additional reporting by Kyle Schnitzer
