Cops on Tuesday cuffed a guy for terrorizing a Jewish man in Williamsburg on Friday evening.
Police slapped the 31-year-old suspect from Bedford-Stuyvesant with hate-crime and third-degree assault charges for allegedly punching the Jewish man wearing what’s called a shtreimel — a fur hat often worn by Hasidic Jews on the Sabbath — in the head on Throop Avenue near Wallabout street around 6:40 pm, injuring him about two hours after Shabbat began at sundown.
The suspect hit the victim in the noggin just days after another punk clocked a Jewish kid, dressed in what authorities described as traditional attire, in the face on a nearby street on Nov. 25.
Authorities are still searching for that suspect, and for other reprobates who attacked another Jewish man on his way to a synagogue in Crown Heights on Saturday.
The brutes attacked the victim from behind at 6:30 am on New York Avenue between Albany and Troy avenues as he walked to the house of worship, beating him and injuring his hand, head, and neck, according to Police Department spokesman Det. Hubert Reyes.
Fortunately for investigators, the man didn’t give in without a fight, and at one point he grabbed a pair of glasses off of one of his attackers, which cops are testing for DNA evidence they hope will lead them to a suspect, according to a report by local blog Crown Heights dot info that cites an anonymous police source.
The Friday and Saturday incidents occurred on the same weekend that another baddie urinated and damaged two statues outside of a Williamsburg Catholic church on Sunday, an act of vandalism cops are also investigating as a hate crime.
And the trio of incidents are the latest in a string of anti-Semitic and other hate crimes that have rocked Brooklyn over the past month.
Last week, prosecutors indicted another Bedford-Stuyvesant man and former city intern for vandalizing and setting fire to synagogues and Jewish schools in Prospect Heights and Williamsburg on in early November. And on Nov. 5, two teens turned themselves in for scrawling swastikas and racial slurs on the exteriors of several homes in Brooklyn Heights on the night before Halloween.
Anyone with information in regard to these incidents is asked to call the NYPD’s Crime Stoppers hotline at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477).The public can also submit their tips by logging onto the CrimeStoppers website at www.nypdcrimestoppers.com, on Twitter @NYPDTips or by texting their tips to 274637 then enter TIP577. All calls are confidential.
