Two New York City teenage girls have been arrested and charged with hate crimes after allegedly hitting a 57-year-old woman in the head and making “anti-white” statements on a bus earlier this month, police said.
A 15-year-old and 16-year-old girl were arrested just before 10 a.m. Tuesday in connection with the July 9 bus incident. Both were charged with assault as a hate crime and aggravated harassment as a hate crime.
Their names were not released as they are minors.
Police released a surveillance photo of the individuals involved in the incident, depicting three Black females, and said they are still searching for the third suspect.
The bus scuffle unfolded around 6:50 p.m. aboard a southbound Q53 MTA bus in the area of Jamaica Avenue and Woodhaven Boulevard in the Queens borough of New York City.
Three individuals approached a 57-year-old woman on the bus and hit her with an unknown object, leaving her with a laceration and bleeding, police said.
The individuals then fled on foot and the woman was taken to Jamaica Hospital Medical Center in stable condition, where she received three staples on her head, police said.
The incident was investigated by NYPD’s Hate Crime Task Force.
A slew of hate crime incidents have been reported in the New York area over the past months.
So far this year in the Big Apple there have been 338 incidents and 360 arrests, according to the NYPD Hate Crimes dashboard, which records hate crimes and bias incidents motivated by a person's race, color, religion, ethnicity, gender, age, or sexual orientation.
In March, a 67-year-old Asian woman was punched 125 times in Yonkers, just north of New York City, and a man was later charged with attempted murder as a hate crime. In June, a woman was charged with hate crimes after she allegedly pepper-sprayed four women, who all identify as Asian, in New York City and told them, “Why don’t you go back to your country.”
The white gunman behind the May mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, that killed 10 Black people was also charged with federal hate crimes.