Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D) dropped assault charges against a Chinatown landlord who fought back when a vagrant attacked him with a nail-studded chunk of wood in late August, the New York Post reported.
Bragg’s office initially charged Brian Chin — a 32-year-old Harvard graduate student — with felony assault after the incident, the paper said.
‘Instead of doing the right thing, [Bragg] used his office to pursue a case against me for nearly five months. It leads me to ask the question: How many other innocent people has he incarcerated?’
Chin spotted the vagrant lying on the ground outside the subway station at Chrystie and Grand Streets in Manhattan around 8:30 p.m. Aug. 24, the Post said. Chin allegedly kicked the male three times, the paper said, citing a criminal complaint.
Chin told the Post he approached the male because he recognized him as a local panhandler and wanted to make sure he was OK: “We have so many drug overdoses and deaths and pretty much every conceivable horror that you can imagine. Immediately, he woke up after that and just started screaming.”
The paper said the pair initially went their separate ways after the encounter — but both came back a few minutes later.
Chin said he returned because he was haunted by the slaying of his renter, Christina Yuna Lee, two years ago, the Post said. Chin blasted Bragg over Lee’s 2022 killing, insisting it could have been prevented since the suspect in her killing had a lengthy criminal history.
“Especially after the murder, if someone is acting violent, I just like to stand by the front door, just to make sure that no one gets followed in, all my tenants are safe,’’ Chin noted to the paper.
More from the Post:
The homeless man did turn violent, breaking a wooden chair and swinging the nail-laden hunk of wood at Chin — who in turn knocked him down and punched him a half-dozen times before the assailant quit.
Blood gushed from the unidentified man’s face as he struggled to get to his feet when cops arrived, the complaint said. And when he tried to stand, he fell back and slammed his head into the subway station railing.
Authorities rushed him to Bellevue Hospital with facial and skull fractures, the complaint said. He was intubated and put on a ventilator afterward.
Chin told the paper he tried to calm him down but feared for his life during the fight: “I just wanted to get home to my wife and kids.” Chin also told the Post that in the aftermath he felt “awful. I never want anyone to get hurt.”
The paper said the assault charges against Chin could have landed him in jail for up to seven years — until Bragg decided not to pursue them.
“It’s our job to thoroughly investigate and prosecute violent conduct, including incidents of alleged assault,” a representative for the Manhattan DA’s office said Sunday, according to the Post. “This case has been dismissed and, as a result, sealed by the court.”
The process is the punishment?
Chin told the paper he’s annoyed that the charges had been hanging over his head since the summer: “I am more angry than relieved because this is something that never should have happened.”
He added to the Post that he “was treated like a violent perpetrator in the eyes of the law, and it has been five months of an unending, waking nightmare. … I woke up every day thinking that I would spend years in jail when I never committed a crime.”
Chin also told the paper that he had to resign from his teaching position because he no longer could pass a background check: “What was this for? It upended my life, everything I spent decades working for.”
He also noted to the Post that the homeless man later was charged with menacing and that it’s “personally abhorrent that this case was ever brought.”
“With such an abundance of evidence from the very start, it was clear that I was not a perpetrator but a victim,” Chin told the paper. “Instead of doing the right thing, [Bragg] used his office to pursue a case against me for nearly five months. It leads me to ask the question: How many other innocent people has he incarcerated? How many were not so fortunate as to have been attacked on their own property and to have access to surveillance footage showing their innocence?”
The Post said Chin compared himself to Jose Alba — the New York City deli worker Bragg charged with murder after Alba stabbed an attacker to death in 2022. After public outrage over what many saw as self-defense, Bragg dropped all charges against Alba.
“How many more victims — how many more Jose Albas, how many more cases such as myself — will need to be at his hands before the politicians who have continually shielded him wake up to the fact that this is not how justice is conducted in this country? It’s not what New Yorkers deserve,” Chin told the paper.
Chin’s attorney Kenneth Gilbert told the Post that Bragg saved face by dropping his client’s charges: “If it had gone to trial, it would have been an embarrassment for the prosecutor’s office.”
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