The landlord of Christina Yuna Lee, a 35-year-old woman who was followed and brutally murdered by a man in her Chinatown apartment, was charged with a felony for allegedly beating a man who was sleeping near the building.
Brian Chin, 32, was seen putting on a pair of black gloves and kicking the unidentified man at the corner of Chrystie and Grand Street just before 8:30 p.m. on Saturday, according to an NYPD officer who obtained video footage of the incident. When the man woke up, he appeared to collect items from the ground and the two went their separate ways before returning minutes later.
At 8:37 p.m., the man was "brandishing an object that appeared to be a strip of wood or plywood," and swinging at Chin, according to the criminal complaint written by NYPD Officer Sean Hildebrand.
In the video obtained by New York Post, the man is seen again raising the object at Chin, and then looking away from him for a second. That's when Chin rushed the man to the ground and punched him six times before standing back up with the object in his right hand.
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NYPD officers, including Hildebrand, then responded to the scene and saw the man "bleeding heavily" from his face and the back of his head.
"At approximately 8:41 I observed John Doe try to climb up to a standing position but then fall backwards and strike his head against the subway station railing," Hildebrand wrote.
The man suffered multiple facial fractures and a skull fracture, according to the written complaint. He was in intensive care on a ventilator as of Sunday afternoon.
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Chin in 2022 recounted how his tenant, Lee, was "mercilessly stalked" up her sixth-floor apartment on Chrystie Street, steps away from Saturday's incident, by Assamad Nash who later pleaded guilty to the horrific crime that left the community unsettled. The killing also came on the heels of the pandemic when violent hate crimes against people of Asian descent were on the rise, although Nash wasn't charged with a hate crime.
No other details about Chin's alleged assault or the victim had been released by officials. Chin did tell the Post that he was defending himself when he punched the man six times.
In a statement to NBC New York, a spokesperson for the Manhattan District Attorney's Office said prosecutors and the NYPD "are continuing to investigate this incident." Chin was arraigned Sunday and released without bail, the DA's office said.
NBC New York reached out to Chin for comment on Wednesday but he did not respond.
