A small group of people marching to protest police violence in Whitestone, Queens on Tuesday was attacked by a man with knives strapped to his arm, who then drove his car on the sidewalk where they were standing, according to dramatic videos of the incident.
The first video starts with an elderly white man standing outside his gray SUV saying “I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you” to a group of protesters on the Clintonville Street overpass of the Cross Island Parkway. He then returns to his car and drives away, yelling “you’re in the wrong neighborhood” as they yell back “fuck you.” He then makes a U-turn across the street lanes to return to the group as voices of the protesters can heard saying “don’t do anything. Just videotape” and “call the police.”
The man then emerges from the SUV with a four-bladed weapon strapped to his forearm and swings at the protestors screaming, “you want to throw shit at my car?”
Another video posted on Instagram shows the driver of the gray SUV plowing down the sidewalk where the protesters were standing before they run away screaming.
One woman who recorded the attack, Arianna Agudo of Woodhaven, told the Queens Eagle she was driving by and saw that the “kids [were] just calmly protesting by just placing signs and posters, all of the sudden the guy started insulting them and the kids just started talking back defending their beliefs.”
Agudo continued, “He literally made a crazy U-turn, parked in front of them and started chasing them with his 4 knife weapon,” she said. “After that, he got back into his car and GOT ON the sidewalk, stepped on the gas pedal and started chasing those kids with the intent of running them over. Then he just got away.”
The knife-wielding driver has not been identified, according to NYPD: "There is a complaint report on file for a menacing incident in the vicinity of Clintonville Street and Cross Island Parkway. A 23-year-old male reported to police that an unidentified individual exited a vehicle with a sharp object and displayed it to a crowd that was peacefully protesting and fled in a vehicle described as a gray SUV Mercury. There were no reported injuries as a result, no arrests at this time and the investigation is ongoing."
