An irate bully attacked an acting student just for looking at him on a Manhattan sidewalk Monday – just days after Steve Buscemi was randomly attacked less than a mile away.
The attacker rushed the 25-year-old male victim on Seventh Avenue near West 25th Street in Chelsea at around 10:50 a.m. Monday and whacked him in the head with a bag stuffed full of items – leaving the budding actor covered in blood “everywhere,” he told The Post.
“I just got off the train,” the victim said, adding he was on his way to acting class at the time. “I see this guy – I’m wearing my headphones and he’s walking toward me – and we make eye contact.
“He [has] his chin down to almost touching his chest, [and] looking up at me through the tops of his eyes, he says, ‘The f–k you doing?’” the young man, who wished to remain anonymous, said. “And [he] just runs right up to me, like rushes me.”
Video obtained by WABC Tuesday shows the moment the attacker stopped in his tracks on the sidewalk, lunged at the backpack-wearing victim walking in the opposite direction and walloped him on the side of the head with a black bag.
The contents of the bag were unclear Tuesday – but the blow was enough to leave the victim with a cut on the top of his head, police said.
“It felt like a box or the corner of a box hit my head. I was just in fight or flight mode – I kept walking,” the victim said in an interview from his home in Queens.
A witness asked the startled actor what happened, but he said he was so stunned he couldn’t reply.
“I was in fight-or-flight mode trying to get around it, to avoid it,” he added. “I was in shock.”
It wasn’t until he realized he was bleeding that reality set in, he said.
“I touched my head and I was like, ‘Oh that’s blood!’” the victim said. “A woman who happened to be a physician handed me a bunch of napkins. And she just said to me, ‘Sit down!’ That’s when I noticed the blood dripping down the side of my face onto my clothes. It was a lot of blood – blood just started getting everywhere.
The attack coming in broad daylight in plain view of passesby left him “shocked and scared,” he said.
“For three seconds I was in full-on fight or flight mode, then I was like, ‘Wait, am I just going to let that guy hit me like this and walk away?’ Then the shock of the blood just sat me right down.”
Cops arrived within five minutes, the victim said.
A worker at the Antalya Convenience store near the scene said he saw the bloodied victim being carted off to the hospital.
“I see blood,” employee David Eli told The Post. “They just take him straight to the ambulance. It was like his head was bleeding.
“It was like someone hit him in the head.”
The wounded man was taken to Lenox Health Greenwich Village, where he was listed in stable condition.
Luckily, the victim didn’t suffer any brain trauma, he said – but two staples were needed to close up the cut on his head.
The victim, who described himself as a “naturally attentive” person, said he used to be “much more conscious of the danger down in the subway but not so much up on the street.
“I didn’t consider it a possibility and in retrospect, I feel less safe about getting attacked in the subway than in the street,” he said.
The suspect fled after the attack and had not been caught by Tuesday evening.
The victim described his assailant as a man with a dark complexion, in his late 20s or early 30s, about 6-feet tall and slim, weighing about 130 pounds.
The glassy-eyed suspect – who may have been under the influence of something – was wearing baggy black clothes and a yellow undershirt, the injured man said.
“I hope they arrest him,” the victim said. “I hope he gets charged with assault and that they put them through that process. I’ll do my part in that process. I never assumed someone would straight up assault me for no f—king reason.”
Less than a week earlier, “Boardwalk Empire” actor Steve Buscemi was strolling on Third Avenue near East 27th Street in Kips Bay Wednesday when a stranger punched him in the face in an unprovoked attack, cops said.
The actor suffered swelling to his face and left eye and was taken to Bellevue Hospital for treatment.
Meanwhile, his deranged assailant took off and remained on the lam Tuesday.
Monday’s victim said a female cop who responded to his assault told him she had been on the scene where Buscemi was attacked last week.
“She was talking to the EMTs while they were trying to deal with the bleeding and they were all saying it’s happening more and more now – at least once a day they’re getting called for these attacks,” the victim said.
Lazarus Ruiz, 29, a local electrical worker, said he’s been seeing far too many unhinged people walking around the area.
“That’s all you see over here,” Ruiz said. “There’s no help for them. It’s going to continue happening until the city or government does something.
“You cannot go somewhere and not see someone crazy,” he added. “Something needs to be done. It’s not fair for the people who wake up every morning and go to work to be worried.
“They need to figure out solutions. The city needs help big time. They need to start arresting them, isolating them and putting them in hospitals to get help.”
The pair of random assaul took place within the confines of the NYPD’s 13th Precinct, which serves a southern portion of Midtown.
Within that precinct’s confines, 78 felony assaults were reported from the beginning of this year through Sunday, just two more than the 76 reported during the same period last year, the latest data show.
Misdemeanor assaults jumped to 199 compared to 170 during the same period in 2023, according to the figures.
Citywide, 9,755 felony assaults had been reported to the NYPD from Jan. 1 through Sunday, the data show – about a 4% jump from the 9,363 reported during the same period last year.
Reports of misdemeanor assaults across the Big Apple rose about 6% to 15,962 – compared to 14,972 year-to-date in 2023.