Saturday, March 11, 2017

Report: Video captures beating on Orchard Street early Friday morning


Here's what unfolded via the Post:

The 24-year-old victim was being chased north on Orchard Street by two men who caught up to him between Stanton and Rivington just before 3 a.m. Friday, according to police.

His attackers repeatedly punched and kicked the man before escaping in a black car, cops said.

And from the Daily News:

The brutal beatdown happened so fast that security guards at nearby bars weren't able to break it up in time, said a man who witnessed the aftermath.

"Nobody could help this person. It was over that quickly," said Chad David, 51.

The video shows several people walking by the attack.

Per CBS 2:

The witness and others screamed at the assailants when the violence began.

“And they wouldn’t stop — just going on and on and on, like, and that’s when I was yelling: ‘Stop! Stop! He’s down! Just leave it! Go!’” the witness said.

No one dared to intervene physically.

PIX 11 says the victim is in serious condition.

Media accounts do not provide descriptions of the suspects. Police say they do not know what motivated the attack.

Anyone with information that could help in the investigation is asked to call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-577-TIPS (8477). You may also submit tips online.

Updated 3/12

CBS 2 spoke with the victim's mother...

Held to the ground and beaten, surveillance video outside 156 Orchard St. shows the 24-year-old victim, William Franco, trying to cover his head while two men kick, stomp, and punch him into the pavement.

His mother lives about a block away from where the attack happened. CBS2’s Jessica Borg spoke exclusively with her Saturday, getting her reaction to the beating.

“Like any mom would be — worried, that’s it,” she said.

Police sources tell CBS2 Franco and the two men had gotten into an altercation at a nearby bar right before that attack. The police sources say Franco claims he never met the attackers before Friday morning.

“He probably don’t know them,” his mother said.

Updated 3/13

DNAinfo reports that the fight started at Pianos. The victim had reportedly been asked to leave the bar.

Per DANinfo:

The spat started inside the bar and music venue at 158 Ludlow St., where the 24-year-old victim and his attackers got into a fight early Friday morning and the victim was booted from the bar, police said.

The victim then waited outside the bar for the suspects to exit, at which point the brawl started up again, the NYPD said.

22 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't know what the motivation for the attack was by it was most like fueled by alcohol.

Anonymous said...

There is lots of bad shit going down on the Lower East Side these days--those neo-Nazi guys attacking that guy at that bar, this attack, the rapper wannabe who assaulted the news guy, the attempted rape, the guy shooting up at that fancy social club. What's in the air?

JQ LLC said...

Those goons were huge. I don't think it was booze, this guy might have owed money.

This may be the surveillance/social media age Kitty Genovese, with the exception that the victim is male and he lived.

This was in an upscale hip and trendy area too. The bad days are back, big time.

Anonymous said...

What is the point of security cameras if the resolution and quality is so bad you can't identify people?

Anonymous said...

Curious if this story will every come out. My guess is random mouthy street static or low end drug deal gone bad.

@JQLLC If you think the bad old days are back you weren't here then.

Anonymous said...

The Lower East Side's Hell Square. Could not pay me to hang out there.


http://gothamist.com/2014/12/24/les_hell_square_video.php

JQ LLC said...

I was watching the world series when Howard Cosell announced the Bronx was burning. I might have been a kid, but I was aware of the environment. And I was mature enough to see the decay and urban blight when I started to work in the city in the late 80's.

Although today's violent crime stats are massively lower than 70's 80's and 90's, the widening economic disparity, the enormous homeless population, the disenfranchising of generations of citizens from their towns from state and city sponsored gentrification plans, Trump's foreboding safety net budget cuts, and the occupation of a corrupt mayor and his certain re-election thanks to the purge of state AG's by that perjuring scumbag traitor Sessions, and a the current wave of serial and random attacks portends a grim and dangerous future for the rest of the year.

Wait for it.

Anonymous said...

Do we need a neighborhood watch? The LES is out of control right now.

Giovanni said...

All of those bars have bouncers, and not one of them even bothered to help a man being beaten half to death in the middle of the sidewalk? As for the bad old days, I felt safer then than I do now. There are more drunks and recreational drug users out late at night starting fights now than there ever were in the so-called bad old days, and for some reason they love the EV, LES and West Village.

Anonymous said...

@JQ LLC - The "bad old days" started going away with operation pressure point, IIRC '83. There is no comparison whatsoever to the level of lawlessness and street crime as late as the early 90s. The homeless population was far, far larger in the late 80s when the band shell was an outlaw SRO for a while. After a last huge blowout with crack around 90 - 92 the neighborhood cleaned up very quickly. Former dope spots were expensive wine bars by the mid to late 90s.

All the rest of your comment is referencing your (and admittedly my) current political focus. I remember the same sky-is-falling predictions pre-WWW about Reagan and, while they did accelerate the dismantling of the old social contract (started under Carter go figure and continued with glee under Clinton) leading to today's gilded age, the Republic survived. Before you say Trump's worse let events play out. Trump is certainly more offensive, he's the Micheal Jordan of offensive, and Sessions is a genuine scumbag for the ages, but they haven't matched Reagan or Bush 43 on the awfulness scale (yet?).

Yeah DiBlazio's a lock. And I suspect there's a scumbag junior Trump Republican about to give him a real challenge. A corrupt incompetent asshole it's a shame.

@ 2:17 PM Out of control? That's ... histrionic. These streets are as safe as I remember with only a few blocks being even slightly scary [left as an exercise to the gentrifier]. Manhattan is a theme park for the global wealthy and their middle management, there is virtually no street crime. No, one guy getting a beatdown on surveillance isn't a crime wave. In old New York that was a slow lunchtime.

cmarrtyy said...

I'm not as worried about the crime on the street. It's a record lows. But nobody is measuring the growing level of hostility which seems to be part of modern day existence.

JQ LLC said...

1:39 and 4:18, I assume your the same person.

It's cool that we see some common ground on this. I only base my opinion that this took place in the middle of the afternoon, broad daylight at 2:30. And the severity of the violence and the impunity displayed.

I am not from the EV but there is a pattern happening here with similar incidents going on in all the boroughs right now, especially a rise of muggings of the elderly and rape attempts. And all the hip galleries, artisan foods, grey and glass towers are not going to stop the crime wave and rampant poverty. If anything, it covers all these inconvenient and dangerous truths up.

Anonymous said...

I'm have to agree with cmartyy and JQ LLC on this one. I've been living here since the 1960s and have never seen the general level of hostility and angry drunken behavior as we see here now. People forget a lot of street crime was between gangs and drug dealers. If you stayed out of their way you didn't have a problem and I never did other the the occasional mugger. I also lived in East Harlem for a short time and it was much more violent up there. We had neighbors overdosing on heroin, shootings and stabbings. The LES and EV were much quieter than Harlem. Now you don't even know who to watch out for, it could be an angry Bro or an Uber driver. Everyone is so angry and mentally ill these days that you never know who is going to explode at you for no good reason.

Anonymous said...

People walking by not helping is no surprise as NYC's youth (let's say 18 to 35) is the sofest, weakest, most oblivious group of youth ever in NYC.

You have to understand something: Let's say all the people who walked by without helping are 22 to 27 years old and 80% of them are from outside NYC. That means the youngest person among them was 13 in 2008 and the oldest was 13 in 2004. Do you honestly expect people who were teenagers growing up mostly outside of NYC in the mid to late '00s to be as brave as people who were teens growing up in or outside NYC in the '70s, '80s, or '90s? I don't. As NYC got safer statistically (far less murders, shootings, assaults etc.) in the late '90s onward the youth got softer. Less of them had to fight thus less of them know how to fight for lack of having to.

I'm not saying these passers by shouldn't have stopped to help the victim, I'm just saying they wouldn't have helped him because most of them are weak and don't know how to fight. None of them would've ran up to one of these guys and punched him dead in the face thus stopped the attack right there as both were oblivious to all around them. In the '70s, '80s, or '90s these guys probably would've been fucked up for any number of reasons besides they're ganging up on someone.

If there were people who were teens from the '70s, '80s, and '90s teens there the kicking might've been stopped.

Anonymous said...

@11:57 PM

"other the the occasional mugger" ... that's funny.

What others are seeing as overall level of hostility I see as overall level of entitlement. Crowds of the self satisfied mostly well paid walking around in their smartphone bubbles getting offended if someone interrupts their texting. But no amount of rose colored glasses about the past can make a herd of drunken Santaconners anywhere near as dangerous as an old school band of marauding teenagers or dope fiends.

But I agree everything was better when I was young and cool. Just nowhere near as safe.

Anonymous said...

I do not know what the undercover police coverage is in the area but it looks like a increase is warranted. Speculation into what motivated this attack is just that speculation. Clear is a brutal attack on a person who I understand is hanging on for his life. Reminiscing about the days of Travis Biddle we live in the now this is a violent crime today.

Anonymous said...

"undercover police coverage"

Ha. That's funny.

Giovanni said...

SantaCon may not be dangerous but it is very annoying and destructive. But what's happening now is both the sense of entitlement and empowerment that right leaning wing nuts in general feel free to express. A lot of these incidents never get reported as hate crimes but come from the same brand of hatred that Trump has unleashed. I guess these losers see all of the huge antiT-rump demonstrations and need to get their aggressions out on anyone they think is not like them. Or as Trump would say, Sad!

Anonymous said...

9:45am Travis Bickle and this is a violent crime regardless of the NYC era.

It is time for a beat cop and an auxillary cop understudy for each of these streets:

Stanton between Essex and Allen
Rivington between Essex and Allen
Norfolk between Houston and Delancey
Essex between Houston and Delancey

It is also time for a private security force most if not all the bars kick in for to patrol the bar streets and make sure incidents like the one in the video don't happen. I'm thinking four licensed bouncers (one per limb grabbed) at least 6'2" and 250 each who work 12-4am Tue-Sat. 80 man hours a week x 40 an hour (800 a man a week) = 3200 total by say 10 bars = 320 a bar by 5 days = 64 a bar a night, a small price to pay for even more safety on the streets. They would constantly patrol the bar streets and act as citizen arrest people. They should be affable but not pushovers and not escalate situations or take things personally. They could work with the beat cops the auxers, and the bouncers.

Also time for a drink limit at these bars. Yeah, I know bars have to make money, but feeding someone say five drinks only invites trouble. Stop serving someone who looks visibly drunk and/or trouble regardless of the number of drinks the person has had. It really starts there.

And time for troublemakers to be photographed and banned from all establishments. Maybe require people to buy a special ID card for all Hell Square establishments to be be served.

Time for all the bars and clubs in Hell Square to have a summit and figure out how to reduce the violence to zero or realistically as close to zero violent incidents a night as possible.



Anonymous said...

The best way to help is calling 911 or find a cop. In the 90's in Williamsburg at my then boyfriends place we heard a commotion downstairs - A guy was slamming a woman's head into the side of a car! - at the same time two kids in their 20's (may age also) walked by and were like "hey stop what are you doing" (we were calling the police by the way). Anyway the guy shot both of those kids - one of them died - and the woman did not press charges or give the guys name (who ran).

Anonymous said...

So thanks for the Travis name correction still think of Sybil Shepard by the way saw the movie in a Manhattan theater for about four bucks...Last year the Mayor and City Council added 1500 officers to the rolls. Undercover police are effective in area's where violent crime is a by product be that drugs or alcohol. If a black car or van was rolling by with three undercover cops things could have turned out differently.Young physically fit cops who will get physical when the occasion requires for bad hombres only fear what they deliver themselves physical violence. Some of what is going on down here from a Elderly Asian man kicked to death two years ago, to the rapes and attacks requires more response. A collection of private security guards needing a 12 dollar an hour job is fine for checking ID's. This stuff requires the sharp end of the spear.

Anonymous said...

11:21pm Those kids weren't street smart. You don't tell someone to stop as you only anger him more and make him think you're gonna call the cops. The best way to handle someone like that is punch him dead in the face. That usually stops someone.

I'm not calling for a collection of 12 an hour rent-a-cops, 12:05pm, I'm calling for four minimum 6'2" 250 lbs licensed, professional roving bouncers making 40 an hour - fuck it, 50 an hour - to help the club bouncers.

Four guys x 20 hours a week a guy (Tue-Sat.12-4am) = 80 work hours x 50 an hour = 4K a week by say 10 bars/clubs = 400 a week per bar/club by 5 days a week = 80 a night per bar/club.

1500 more cops hired? Ok, put just fifteen of them in Hell Square where every cop knows every inch of that box and the nonsense ends.