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- The incident reportedly occurred on Imperial Avenue near Escuela Street in the neighborhood of Lincoln Park, according to The San Diego Union Tribune.
- “Some fellow came up and asked, ‘Are you Chinese or Vietnamese?’ and my brother-in-law said leave me alone,” Dennis Lambert, who visited Sonouvong at the hospital, told CBS News 8.
- Lambert said the suspect then shoved Sonouvong to the ground and repeatedly hit him. The attack reportedly left the 81-year-old with multiple injuries, including a punctured left eye and a forehead laceration.
- “Guy kicked in his ribs pretty good and [gave him a] bloody nose [and a] big, large black eye,” Lambert said. “He’s beat up pretty bad when I went to see him.”
- API Initiative Government and Public Relations Director JoAnn Fields said that Friday’s attack was the third against an elderly Asian person in San Diego. API Initiative’s team is proposing a “rapid response action plan” to raise awareness, boost data collection and improve overall safety in the city.
- “Currently, we don’t have a formalized structure [of reporting],” Fields told KUSI News, adding that they need funds for implementation. “That’s what we need to do so that we can build out a website, have videos in [multiple] languages so [that] we can reach the community, and pull the information and get it out as soon as possible.”
- Fields said they were told that Sonouvong’s attacker was a Caucasian man. No arrests have been made as of this writing.