After a year of mostly staying in his home in Vallejo to catch the coronavirus, 59-year-old Danilo Yuchang decides he needs to take out more. When his travel agency announced it would launch Monday in downtown San Francisco, Yuchang thought, “Why not?”
The Filipino Chinese man was walking in Market Street and was returning to the office from his lunch after fetching siomai from a restaurant in Chinatown, when someone pushed him from behind and hit him on the ground. Yuchang lost consciousness when the person repeatedly hit him, broke bones in his face and bruised his eyes until it was almost swollen.
When he got there, a doorman from a nearby hotel tapped him, handed him napkins and asked if he was okay. Yuchang noticed that his blood was splashing on the sidewalk and thought he had been stabbed.
“I’m happy,” he said in an interview Thursday. “If I was stabbed, I might be dead by now.”
Yuchang was among numerous victims in a series of attacks on Asian residents in the Bay Area, which scrambled law enforcement and kept members of the Asian American community on the alert.
Over the past week, police have arrested several suspects in connection with recent attacks, including Jorge Devis-Milton, 32, who allegedly beat Yuchang and another man on Monday afternoon. Devis-Milton was booked Tuesday in San Francisco County Jail on several charges, including assault and battery.
Yuchang said his left eye was still bleeding from Monday’s attack, and he was still recovering from broken facial bones.
(Danilo Yuchang)
According to police, Devis-Milton first attacked a 64-year-old white man about 30 minutes before Yuchang was assaulted. The man, who was not identified, was also hit on the ground and sustained a stab wound to his cheek, San Francisco police spokesman Robert Rueca said. He was transported to a local hospital with injuries described as life-threatening, where he is still receiving medical help, authorities said.
Yuchang spoke to The Times on Thursday while on his way to the hospital for an examination of his left eye, which is still bleeding. He has had difficulty remembering things since the attack, he said. After the hospital trip, he said he planned to stay home for several weeks.
“Emotionally, I’m still traumatized by what happened to me,” Yuchang said.
Stop AAPI Hate, a reporting center born in San Francisco State University’s American American Studies Division, found in the past year, more than 3,700 hate cases in the US have reported on themselves. The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, a research office in the state of San Bernardino, found a total of 122 anti-Asian hate crimes in a survey among police departments in 16 major U.S. cities last year – an increase of 149% over the 49 in 2019.
San Francisco police conducted 17 hate crime investigations in 2020, up from six a year earlier, according to SFPD data. Nearly 12% of hate crimes in 2020 were targeted at Asians, Rueca said.
“We do not know if there is an issue of underreporting or just not, we do not know what,” Rueca said. “People would expect more, especially just with the recent spending that has taken place since the beginning of 2021.”
On Wednesday afternoon, San Francisco police arrested Steven Jenkins, who is accused of assaulting an 83-year-old Asian man earlier in the morning in the city’s UN Plaza. Rueca said a local security guard saw the attack and began chasing Jenkins.
As he ran away, Jenkins, 39, hit a 75-year-old Asian woman in 7th and Market streets in the heart of San Francisco’s theater district, Rueca said. Both attacks were not provoked, police said.
KPIX-TV Channel 5 reports that the woman, Xiao Zhen Xie, defended herself by punching her attacker. Her grandson John Chen lived in A GoFundMe tells that his grandmother – a 26-year-old San Francisco resident – has a bruised wrist and eyes that are swollen and bleeding, and he said she is “seriously, mentally, physically and emotionally affected.”
“She is afraid to walk out of her house from now on,” Chen wrote online. “This traumatic event left her with PTSD.”
Rueca said Jenkins was admitted to the hospital due to unrelated injuries.
San Francisco police also arrested three men on Wednesday on suspicion of trapping a 67-year-old Asian man in a laundromat near Nob Hill and Chinatown nearly a month earlier. A security video shows the man sitting next to the window shortly before 10pm on February 23, when the three men walked in, kicked from his chair and dragged him to the ground.
The man told police his assailants “threw him to the ground, assaulted him, stole his property and fled the scene,” authorities said in a news release.
After nearly a month of investigation, police arrested Antioch resident Calvin Berschell, 19; Jason Orozco, 20; and Nolowde Beshears, 19. Police said they suspect the three were also responsible for several car burglaries surrounding the laundry shortly before the attack.
All three were booked on several charges in the San Francisco County Jail, including second-degree burglary and injuring an elderly man.
Across various social media channels in the city, San Francisco leaders have shown support for the city’s Asian community.
‘San Francisco is a beacon of diversity. Let us continue this legacy by ending all anti-Asian discrimination. No prejudice. No hatred. No violence. # COVID-19 virus has no race or nationality. It is simply a disease, ” tweeted the city’s department of emergency management.
In a separate tweet, San Francisco police acknowledged “a disturbing increase in shameless anti-Asian violence” and promised to increase patrols in predominantly Asian neighborhoods. Police Chief Bill Scott also tweeted support for those affected by the shooting in Atlanta.
“@SFPD stands in solidarity with our AAPI community against these heinous crimes. If we work together, we must prevent violence and hold offenders accountable for it # StopAsianHate, “Scott tweeted.
Yuchang is a travel agent who has lived in the San Francisco area for 21 years. But after Monday’s incident, the 59-year-old said he was seriously considering moving to Indiana.
(Danilo Yuchang)
But limiting the wave of anti-Asian attacks may be too little for some San Francisco residents, too late.
Yuchang, a Bay Area resident for nearly 21 years, said he often walked home late at night, unconcerned about his safety. But such a traumatic incident in broad daylight in the busy Market Street – especially in light of other attacks on Asian people – upset him. Now, he said, San Francisco feels unsafe, and he is seriously considering moving with his wife to Indiana, where his sister lives.
“I do not know why this is happening to us,” Yuchang said. “I just want to make people aware that they need to be very careful. It’s not very safe. ”