'Where's Your F---Ing Mask?': Asian Man Harassed In Forest Hills

FOREST HILLS, QUEENS — An Asian man in Forest Hills says he was harassed while bringing his son to school Thursday morning by a man clad in camouflage who shouted, "Where is your f---ing mask?" and tried to attack him.

The man — who asked to be identified only by his first name, Jeff, to protect his family — told Patch he was bringing his son to a school bus stop on Yellowstone Boulevard when the man started cursing at him and tried to hit him in the head.

"Where's your f---ing mask, you Chinese b---h?" the man yelled at him, Jeff told Patch in a phone interview.

Jeff and his son kept walking, but the man chased after them, he recalled.

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"I tried not to do anything like yelling back at him because my son was there," he said.

The man left after a police car pulled up and an NYPD officer asked what was going on, according to Jeff's retelling. After he told the officer that he'd been attacked, the police drove after the man but returned with an empty backseat.

Jeff told Patch he didn't file a police report because he thought the photos and videos he took of the man wouldn't be enough to identify him, and that he wasn't sure police would be helpful.

An NYPD spokesperson said he couldn't provide any information on the incident because the local police precinct has no report on file, but a Forest Hills mother who witnessed the encounter corroborated Jeff's story in an interview with Patch.

That parent, whose child attends school with Jeff's son and asked to remain anonymous, said she was waiting at the school bus stop with several other parents when she noticed a man wearing camouflage-print clothes and purple medical gloves swearing at Jeff and swinging his arms as if to hit him.

"I was rattled," she said. "Those purple gloves, I won't forget."

The woman, who is of Asian descent, called the confrontation an example of the fear that's "consuming everyone" amid the spread of misinformation about the new coronavirus, officially known as COVID-19.

Though data shows a decline in hate crimes as of March 1, the NYPD Hate Crimes Task Force is investigating several similar incidents across the city as misinformation about the virus, which originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan, fuels racism and xenophobia against Chinese and other Asian communities.

An Asian woman in Manhattan was punched in the face and accused of having the new coronavirus, according to ABC7 New York, and an Asian man riding the subway was sprayed with what appeared to be a cleaning solution.

“Right now, we’ve seen particularly troubling instances of discrimination directed at Asian communities, particularly the Chinese community,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said Thursday. “This is unacceptable."

The NYPD urges people who believe they were the victim of a hate crime to report incidents to their local police precinct or call 911 for crimes in progress.

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