beatdown

A black New York fashion student says he was attacked by a group of men who shouted anti-gay slurs at him while walking home after a night of partying.

22-year-old Taj Patterson was headed home to Fort Greene around 4:30 a.m. on Dec. 1 when more than a dozen Orthodox Jewish men assaulted him on Flushing Ave.

Patterson says his attackers repeatedly called him homophobic slurs as they punched, kicked and stumped him as he lay on the ground helpless. 

From the New York Daily News:

“I’m walking down some block by myself and then the next thing I know, I’m surrounded by a group of Hasidic Jewish men and they’re attacking me,” Patterson said. “I was alone. I was an easy target. I’m black. I’m gay, a whole slew of reasons.” The New York City College of Technology student left for a fun night out with friends, and returned with a broken eye socket, a torn retina, blood clotting, and cuts and bruises to his knee and ankles.

[…]

Patterson was “highly intoxicated, uncooperative and incoherent,” after the assault, according to a police complaint — but he remembers the ringleader. “There was a crowd around him, cheering him on and getting him rowdy, and he would grab me and push me against the wall,” Patterson said. While the instigator was kicking him in the face, “he told me to ‘stay down, f—-t, stay the f— down,’ ” Patterson recalled. “And that’s really all I can remember of that.”

Read more at New York Daily News

The NYPD’s hate crimes unit is investigating the assault.

Hopefully the culprits of this assault are brought to justice.

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