A 75-year-old woman, who witnesses say was being beaten by a man, has been heralded as a survivor after she fought the man back at a busy intersection in San Francisco.
Xiao Zhen Xie was standing at the intersection of Market St. and Charles J. Brenham Place near McAllister Street in San Francisco on Wednesday morning, waiting for the traffic light to change, when a white man, who has been described as having shaggy blond hair, ran up to her and punched her face, according to a CBS San Francisco report. In response to the brutal attack, Xie, 75, picked up a wooden plank and hit back, striking the man’s face.
Police soon arrived on the scene, where Xie stood in visible tears, gripping a makeshift weapon as the bleeding assailant was secured to a stretcher.
“You bum, why did you hit me?” the woman said to the man on the stretcher in Chinese.
Police arrested Steven Jenkins, 39, on Thursday. Jenkins was also accused of an unprovoked assault of another older Asian American person that day. Ngoc Pham, an 83-year-old Vietnamese American man, was grocery shopping at a farmers market, according to a GoFundMe organized by Community Youth Center of San Francisco. Jenkins assaulted Pham, police said, and he fell to the ground, the GoFundMe page said. A witness notified a security guard, who chased after Jenkins as he tried to escape.
He is now charged with two counts of assault and elder abuse.
“Investigators are working to determine if racial bias was a motivating factor in the incident,” Robert Rueca, a spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department, said in a statement to The Washington Post.
The violent act came hours after San Francisco police announced it would increase patrols in Asian neighborhoods following a recent surge of attacks in the city and across the nation, including a shooting rampage in Georgia that left six Asian American women and two other people dead.
The coalition Stop AAPI Hate reported earlier this week that since March 2020, as the pandemic forced nationwide shutdowns, there have been almost 3,800 reported incidents nationwide — only a fraction of the actual number, the group says.
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