SAN FRANCISCO – The family members of an 84-year-old man killed in a seemingly unprovoked attack last week in San Francisco said Monday that they believe the victim was targeted because he was an Asian senior citizen.

They spoke to KTVU as District Attorney Chesa Boudin released a statement vowing to “hold the person who committed this senseless violence accountable.”

Video of the shocking killing of Vicha Ratanapakdee in the city’s Anza Vista neighborhood was captured on a neighbor’s security camera and shared with KTVU.

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Family believes attack of 84-year-old man in San Francisco was racial motivated

Evan Sernoffsky reports.

An assailant, later identified by police as 19-year-old Antoine Watson, came barreling across the street around 8:30 a.m. Thursday in the quiet residential neighborhood, slamming into the fragile victim and sending him sprawling to the ground.

Ratanapakdee was pronounced dead at San Francisco General Hospital two days later.

The startling broad daylight attack went viral on social media, striking a chord with members of the Asian American community in the Bay Area and beyond.

“If you see the video there’s nothing non-intentional about it,” Ratanapakdee’s step-son, Eric Lawson, said in an interview with KTVU. “For him to come from all the way across the street what else could have motivated him?”

Lawson and his wife Kim, Ratanapakdee’s daughter, believe the assailant’s targeted their father because he was an Asian senior.

In fact, Kim Ratanapakdee said she has been the victim of several anti-Asian verbal attacks since the coronavirus pandemic halted life-as-usual last year.

“I don’t know what was going on,” she said after seeing the video of the attack. “I don’t know why he’s attacking an old man.”

The family visited homicide detectives on Monday as they continuted processing their grief, hoping for justice. They said Vicha Ratanapakdee had come to live with them from his native Thailand. They described him as a “gentle person who loved his family.”

“It hasn’t settled in totally for me yet. I go back and forth from anger to crying right after that,” Lawson said. “It just doesn’t seem real. It just doesn’t seem real.”

The district attorney’s office has until Tuesday to file charges after the case was presented by police on Monday.

Officers arrested Watson along with 20-year-old Maylasia Goo a home in Daly City on Saturday.

Watson was booked in San Francisco Jail on suspicion of murder and elder abuse. Goo was booked on suspicion of being an accessory.

“I send my deepest condolences to the Ratanapakdee family for their loss,” Boudin said in his statement. “This was a brutal, random, unprovoked attack.  My heart is also with the entire AAPI community for the pain they’re experiencing as a result of this tragedy and too many others over the past year.  We will hold the person who committed this senseless violence accountable.” 

The family has created a GoFundMe page to help pay for expenses around Ratanapakdee’s death.

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Evan Sernoffsky is an investigative reporter for KTVU. Email Evan at evan.sernoffsky@foxtv.com and follow him on Twitter @EvanSernoffsky.

“General Hospital” actor Johnny Wactor was killed early Saturday while trying to stop a group of thieves tampering with a car in downtown Los Angeles, his mother confirmed.

Wactor, who died at the age of 37, was shot while trying to stop a group of three men attempting to steal his car’s catalytic converter. The shooting took place around 3 a.m. near the intersection of Hope Street and Pico Boulevard, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.

One of the suspects fired at the victim and then the trio fled the scene. Police were dispatched to the location at about 3:15 a.m. Paramedics rushed the shooting victim to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.    

“I just don’t understand what a senseless coward act by that person,” Scarlett Wactor, the victim’s mother, told NBC4.

No description of the suspects was immediately available.

Catalytic converters are popular targets for thieves because they are rich in precious metals that can be resold.

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Anyone with information regarding the shooting was urged to call the LAPD’s Central Station at 213-486-6606. Tipsters who prefer to remain anonymous can call Crime Stoppers at 800-222-8477 or visit lacrimestoppers.org.

By Khristina Narizhnaya and Aaron Feis Published Dec. 12, 2019 Updated Dec. 12, 2019, 11:33 p.m. ET

Students at both Barnard College and nearby Columbia University were on edge Thursday in the wake of the murder of Barnard freshman Tessa Majors inside Morningside Park.

“It’s just so shocking that it happened so close to campus,” said Camila Vicioso, a 20-year-old Columbia freshman. “She was just walking in Morningside Park, not even that late. It’s crazy. It’s scary.”

Majors, 18, was fatally knifed in the face, neck and arm near a flight of stairs inside the Upper Manhattan park around 5:35 p.m. Wednesday, in what police sources have called a robbery gone awry.

Investigators are grilling “persons of interest” in the slaying, and exploring whether it was connected to a recent string of muggings in the area.

There had already been an increased police presence in the area, NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea said Thursday, in vowing an “all hands on deck” response.

But some students were skeptical.

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“The increased amount of police on campus and the area doesn’t seem to be keeping anyone safe,” said Mia Greenberg, a 20-year-old anthropology major at Barnard.

“It’s scary. It’s sad,” said Greenberg, who took a large environmental science class with Majors, but didn’t know her personally. “She was 18, that’s so f–ked up.”

Barnard comparative literature senior Stella Sapington, 21, said students were shaken by the murder.

“It’s jarring,” she said. “Everyone is talking about it, even on the sidewalks you can hear people talking about it.

“It wasn’t even that late,” Sapington added. “I run around there, by those stairs.

“Pretty much everyone I know has walked through the park.”

A man has been charged with attempted murder as a hate crime after a vicious assault in Yonkers, N.Y., that was captured by a security camera.

By Ed Shanahan

Published March 14, 2022 Updated March 16, 2022

A 67-year-old woman, wearing a white face mask and dark hooded jacket and pushing a shopping cart, enters an apartment building vestibule in Yonkers, N.Y. As she moves to unlock the door, a man comes up behind her and hits her in the head with a roundhouse right hand.

The force of the blow knocks the woman to the ground. As she lies there, her attacker bends down and pummels her repeatedly with both hands for the next minute, more than 125 blows altogether. He then stomps on her seven times and spits on her before walking away.

The sickening assault, captured by a security camera, came after the woman, who is of Asian descent, passed the man on her way into the building, officials said. He called her an anti-Asian, misogynistic slur and she ignored him. Moments later, he attacked her in what officials said was violence driven by anti-Asian bias, yet another incident in a nationwide surge.

On Monday, the Yonkers Police Department and the Westchester County district attorney announced that Tammel Esco, 42, of Yonkers had been charged with attempted murder and assault, both as hate crimes, as a result of the attack, which occurred shortly after 6 p.m. on Friday.

Mr. Esco was waiting outside the building when the police arrived on Friday while the victim, bloodied and writhing in pain, lay on the floor, officials said.

“This is one of the most appalling attacks I have ever seen,” John J. Mueller, the Yonkers police commissioner, said in a statement. “To beat a helpless woman is despicable, and targeting her because of her race makes it more so.”

The woman, whose name was not released, sustained broken bones in her face, bleeding on the brain and numerous cuts and bruises on her head and face, officials said. She was hospitalized in stable condition on Monday, Yonkers police officials said.

Mr. Esco was being held without bail at the Westchester County jail. Online court records indicated that he was being represented by the Legal Aid Society. A representative declined to comment.

He has 14 previous arrests, half of them on felony charges, according to the Yonkers police. He was convicted of assault in 2011, sentenced to just over three years in prison and released on parole after about two and a half years in October 2013, state prison records show.

The vicious assault appeared to be anomalous for Yonkers, where, census figures show, about 7 percent of the 200,000 residents are of Asian descent. Neither the city, which is just north of New York City, nor Westchester County broadly has seen increases in reports of bias crimes targeting those of Asian descent in recent years, officials said.

The experience has been starkly different in New York City and other parts of the United States, where anti-Asian violence has risen sharply during the coronavirus pandemic. From March 19, 2020, through the end of last year, nearly 11,000 hate crimes targeting those of Asian and Pacific Island descent across America were reported to Stop AAPI Hate, an advocacy organization.

In New York City, the police recorded 131 bias incidents against Asians in 2021, up from 28 in 2020 and just three in 2019. Activists have cautioned that the figures may not tell the whole story because bias incidents are not always classified as such or reported to the police.

This month, a 28-year-old man was charged with hate crimes in connection with a two-hour spree of attacks on seven women of Asian descent in Manhattan.

Four Asian New Yorkers have died in recent months after being attacked: a Chinese immigrant who was beaten as he collected cans in East Harlem; a 40-year-old woman who was pushed to her death at the Times Square subway station; a 35-year-old woman who was fatally stabbed by a man who followed her into her Chinatown apartment; and a 61-year-old woman who was attacked as she swept a sidewalk in Corona, Queens, in November.

Sheelagh McNeill contributed research. Credit: New York Times

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