The Harlem community came out in support of a 31-year-old woman who was attacked by a group of men after she rejected one of them.
Hundreds of people protested outside the liquor store where the woman was attacked.
The woman, who asked not to be identified, said she was walking home from work around 6 p.m. when she stopped at a liquor store for a bottle of wine.
Inside the store on 128th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, she was accosted by a group of men who offered to buy the wine for her.
The woman said the man in the red parka (pictured above) asked if he could buy her bottle of wine for her, but she politely declined.
After she left the store the men chased her across the street and kicked her — and the man in the red parka bit her face above her eye. They also stole her phone and the bottle of wine.
“No matter how much I asked, you know, I’m trying to get [home] to my daughter, please leave me alone. I said ‘I’ll call the cops’ — he didn’t care about that. He had one thing on his mind and that was to attack me. That’s what he wanted to do.”
“I couldn’t believe it, it was like an animal. That’s the only way I can put it, it was like an animal,” she said in an interview. “I just remember screaming to the top of my lungs, I just kept saying ‘He’s biting me! He’s biting me!’ He bit through my eyebrow and then he continued to just, he kept opening his mouth to try to like re-grasp.”
Her injuries required stitches and she still has bruises from the encounter.
“I was mauled, this is more than being bitten. I was mauled – that he didn’t just bite me and like that was it. This was a recurring action that he did on my face as if he was trying to literally take my eye. That’s what it felt like,” she told ABC7.
“I will never forget that look in his eyes and it’s just being that close to me in my face, and just trying to do that like it’s feeling him biting on me and just his breath on me and just the scent of his clothes. He really just needs to be caught, all of them, because I didn’t deserve this, I was minding my business.”
Her attackers are still at large.
