Fifty women have been randomly attacked by strangers so far this year in the lower half of Manhattan, an NYPD official said.
“The trend that I’m getting from the people that we’re arresting, the majority of them are homeless, the majority of them seem like they need some kind of help with mental illness,” Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said at One Police Plaza Tuesday.
Most of the attacks don’t appear to be copycats and cops don’t consider them a trend, Kenny said.
But some of them have become high profile because of victims posting on social media, he said.
“This is no new phenomenon,” Kenny said. “It’s just being reported at a higher rate and getting a lot more publicity than it normally does because of social media . . . we welcome that. We want to encourage reporting so that we can make these arrests.”
Out of the 50 female victims, 37 were attacked in the street and 13 in the transit system, he said.
Some were punched and others were struck with objects.
Arrests have been made in 14 of the attacks, he said.
Overall, there have been 95 random attacks so far in 2024, a 12.8% decrease from the 109 in the same period of 2023, he said.
He did not provide data on how many women were attacked in the same period last year.
Social influencer Halley McGookin — who goes by “Halley Kate” on TikTok — posted a tearful video about being randomly punched in the face March 25 in Chelsea.
“You guys, I was literally just walking and a man came up and punched me in the face,” the weeping blonde said in the video that’s garnered 5.2 million likes. “OMG. It hurts so bad.”
Two days later, cops arrested Skiboky Stora, a perennial down-ballot political candidate who ran for mayor, and charged him with assault and harassment, records show.
He was also charged with two attacks in Manhattan last year, Kenny said.
Mikayla Toninato, 27, told The Post she was frozen in shock March 26 when she was punched in the face by a man she didn’t know in Union Square.
“I didn’t see him coming at all. I screamed out of shock. He knocked my head back so hard I just kind of like gasped and screamed,” she said of the 6-foot-tall maniac.
Marketing professional Stephanie Weng from the Financial District, told The Post she feels “unsafe” knowing the man who hit her in the face near Union Square March 20 is still out there.
“I think he was really kind of intentional with his actions,” the 33-year-old said. “And it just was just like, super traumatizing and like very, very scary when it did happen. It’s really kind of hard for me to talk about.”
