From Flickr Creative Commons by duncan c
Kaylee Cong’s father, a 60-year-old Vietnamese man, was attacked from the behind during a walk in Chicago, Ill., the Chicago Tribune reports. Though it has been a week since the father, Chau Buu, was punched in the head, the investigation is still pending, and the police are not investigating the attack as a hate crime.
“I still think that it’s a hate crime because I don’t think anybody would like to attack somebody that did nothing to them,” Cong said to the Chicago Tribune. “He was just walking on the street by himself, and he didn’t do anything to anybody.”
According to Cong, her father had refused to tell her why his head hurt until the morning after the incident. When she urged him to report the attack to the police and to go to the hospital for treatment, Buu refused.
When he finally told her what occurred, she learned that he had been approached from behind before being punched on the left side of the head. Though Buu took a picture of the attacker as he left, he was only able to capture an unclear silhouette.
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When Buu turned around, he found another man waiting with a baseball bat. He threatened to call the police, and the man fled afterwards.
“We fear, and we’re scared,” Cong told NBC 5.
After she heard her father’s story, Cong called the police department to report the assault. What followed was a series of frustrating redirects, as she was transferred to lines that no one picked up and redialed multiple times without success.
After she filed an online report, she discovered the next day that the report was not filed because she classified the attack as a simple assault rather than a battery, which requires a statement to a police officer and the involvement of the victim.
“Filing a report shouldn’t be that hard,” Cong said to the Chicago Tribune.
She later took to social media to share her father’s story in the hopes of spreading awareness about anti-AAPI hate and violence in Chicago. Despite a near 150% increase in anti-AAPI hate crimes, the number of hate crimes classified as anti-AAPI reported to the Chicago police department has stayed the same from 2019 to 2020, according to its website.
“I want others to know that if you see anything happening like this you know on the road, if you witness it, or something like that, then you have to speak up or stand up by them,” Cong told the Chicago Tribune. “For our old generation … it’s hard for them to speak up for themselves and all that. So I really hope that if you see something like this just stand up, speak up for them.”
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