White man beaten with skateboard in suspected San Francisco hate crime
Suspect "shared some words that were described as racial" before attacking.
A manhunt is on in San Francisco for a suspected teenager who allegedly screamed racial slurs at a white man and beat him with a skateboard in the middle of the day on the main thoroughfare of the city, police said Monday.
The apparently random attack occurred at 2:30 p.m. Sunday about two blocks from San Francisco's Union Square shopping district, police said.
"We just know that the suspect encountered the victim and shared some words that were described as racial, and just started attacking the victim," Officer Robert Rueca, a spokesman for the San Francisco Police Department, said. "Essentially, the victim was assaulted by the suspect with a skateboard."
The 22-year-old victim was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, Rueca added.
The victim, whose name was not released, told detectives that the attacker appeared to be Hispanic and 17 to 19 years old, Rueca said.
"We're still piecing together the incident but not really knowing what led up to this, if anything led up to this," he said.
The victim told police he was walking on Market Street when the attacker skated up to him and began yelling racial slurs before picking up his skateboard and pummeling him with it, Rueca said.
The San Francisco Police Department's Special Investigation Division was probing the incident as a hate crime, Rueca said, adding that investigators were looking for security footage in the area that may have captured the incident.
"We haven't gotten similar cases recently," Rueca said. "As far as hate crimes are concerned, we don't receive a lot of them but we investigate every single one of them thoroughly."
