A 15-year-old boy was arrested on Friday in connection with an assault on an Asian couple in Washington state, which was captured on video and shared on social media this week.
Footage show a person in a red hoodie who runs to the couple and swings at the man while the woman shouts. In another video clip, the man is cursed and appears to have been pushed or hit by the person recording the video, who also said he hit the victim in the mouth.
The man (56) sustained a broken rib during the attack, reports KING-TV, the NBC subsidiary in Seattle. While videos of the attack were shared on social media this week, the incident took place in November last year.
The attack was reported to Tacoma police at the time, police spokeswoman Wendy Haddow said in an email to NBC News.
“At that time, the only information suspected was two black men aged 13 to 17,” she said. “There was no video known at the time.”
However, the victim’s family contacted authorities after seeing the new video on the news this week, Haddow said.
Police did not disclose the identity of the 15-year-old who was arrested. The teenager is charged with second-degree assault, police said in a statement.
Tacoma police said earlier this week that they did to investigate the attack as a hate crime, but authorities could not say whether it would be prosecuted as such, reports KING-TV.
Although police have no motive for the attack, the Asian couple were assaulted amid a recent increase in racially motivated attacks on Asian Americans nationwide.
Anti-Asian hate crimes in 16 of the nation’s largest cities have increased by 149 percent by 2020, according to an analysis of official preliminary police data by the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. This boom took place amid an overall decline in hate crimes.
The report said that the first increase in hate crimes in March and April last year took place at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic amid ‘negative stereotyping of Asians in connection with the pandemic’.
