Cops cuffed two alleged bigots on charges of attacking an interracial couple and threatening to lynch the black boyfriend on E. 17th Street on July 8, police said.
The 42-year-old black man was walking with his 38-year-old white girlfriend near Avenue R a little before 6 am when the alleged racists came up to them and started spewing racial slurs, telling them they aren’t welcome in the neighborhood, according to court documents.
“You punk m———–, you punk a– n—-!” said the 27-year-old and 25-year-old suspects, according to police. “This is our neighborhood you f—— n—–! Get out of here! Do you want to crack him open? Go back to your neighborhood, we’re going to lynch you, you f—— charcoal burner!”
The alleged white separatists — one of whom lives in Sheepshead Bay and the other in Madison — then reportedly started punching the black man in the head and arm. His girlfriend called 911, but one of the men allegedly whacked her cellphone out of her hand, officials said.
One of the suspects — who has more than 20 arrests on his rap sheet — even started threatening the black police officer who responded to the call wthat he would kill him as he being hauled off in handcuffs, according to the Daily News.
The victim said he expects some of his neighbors to be biased, but he’s just grateful the two men didn’t put both him and his girlfriend in the hospital.
“I’ve always felt that living in this part of Brooklyn there is this sort of deep-seated racism,” he told the Daily News. “For them to make that attack based on pure racism is a sad sort of commentary on where we are at in this society at this given time. It’s disappointing, it was scary, it was unnerving. But thank God we didn’t get hurt.”
Police arrested the two men and charged them with a hate crime, assault, criminal mischief, and harassment, and the Hate Crime Task Force is investigating the attack, police said.
