Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 15, 1990 TAG: 9005150331
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
The crime was classified as a bias assault, but Police Commissioner Lee Brown stressed that it was not a premeditated attack, having grown out of a chance encounter.
The fight also wasn't related to a black-led boycott of two nearby Korean-American grocery stores, Brown said.
Sunday's attack exacerbated tensions in a city where race relations are under such strain that Mayor David Dinkins, the first black to hold the office, made a televised appeal Friday for an end to bigotry and hate.
Also Monday, two juries continued deliberating in the Bensonhurst racial attack case. Two white youths are charged with murder in the death of a black teen-ager killed by a mob he encountered in the predominantly white Bensonhurst neighborhood.
The grocery boycott began Jan. 18, after a black woman allegedly was roughed up by workers in one of the stores because she had refused to let them look in her purse. Though boycott organizers insist it isn't racially motivated, pickets outside the stores have shouted anti-Korean slurs.
The two teen-agers arrested Monday live near the scene of the black-Vietnamese melee in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Ulner Alsaint, 18, was charged with felonious assault and possession of a dangerous instrument, a claw hammer, Brown told reporters. A 13-year-old girl, whose name was withheld, was charged as a juvenile with criminal mischief.
Alsaint is accused of hitting Tuan Ana Cao over the head, fracturing his skull. Cao was listed in guarded and stable condition at Kings County Hospital, where he was interviewed by detectives from the police bias squad.
Brown said the incident began early Sunday, when about 10 black teen-agers leaving parties gathered in front of an apartment building.
The 13-year-old girl threw a beer bottle, shattering a window in the ground-floor apartment.
"Six Vietnamese men were eating at a table close to the window," Brown said. "Some of the Vietnamese men left the apartment to find out what happened and a dispute erupted."
Each side accused the other of starting the trouble, and each accused the other of having at least one knife, though no knives were found.
The blacks screamed "Koreans get out of America!" and other slurs against Koreans, Chinese and Japanese. Because of that, the crime was classified as bias-related.
by CNB