A Brooklyn grand jury will investigate an alleged attack on a black man by two Jewish men in Crown Heights.
Andrew Charles, a 20-year-old college student, says he was attacked April 14. Charles, the son of a New York City police officer, said in the New York Daily News that he was sprayed with Mace and beaten with a stick by two men wearing yarmulkes.
Charles met Wednesday with the Brooklyn prosecutor, the Daily News reported.
The attack is not being treated as a bias crime, police told The New York Times, and there have been no arrests.
Investigators believe the alleged attackers were members of the Crown Heights Shmira Patrol, a volunteer group comprised mostly of Chasidic men. One assailant identified by his car’s license plates refused to answer police questions and was not picked out by Charles in a police lineup, the Times reported.
Crown Heights was the site of black rioting in 1991 in which a visiting Lubavitcher student, Yankel Rosenbaum, was fatally stabbed after being surrounded by a group of blacks. The rioting was precipitated by the accidental death of a black child, Gavin Cato, who was hit by a car in the Lubavitcher rebbe’s motorcade.
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