The government of New York City keeps saying they’re going to stop freeing ultra-violent criminals without bail, but then they just keep doing it.
They are obviously creating all of this chaos on purpose for reasons we can only speculate about.
A convicted sex offender who allegedly cold-cocked a man on a Bronx street — leaving him in a coma with brain injuries — was freed without bail Thursday after getting his attempted-murder charges reduced in the unprovoked attack.
Bui Van Phu, 55, was instead charged by the Bronx District Attorney’s Office with assault and harassment, both misdemeanors, for the brutal knockout punch last Friday that left 52-year-old Jesus Cortes unconscious on the street, according to a criminal complaint.
The victim required brain surgery and is now in a medically induced coma, authorities said.
The new charges against Phu are not bail eligible, and a Bronx judge cut him loose on supervised release at his arraignment Thursday, a spokesperson for the DA’s Office said.
The NYPD had charged Phu with attempted murder after arresting him Wednesday for the attack that appeared to have come out of the blue.
“The police charged him with Attempted Murder and when we got the case we evaluated and charged based on evidence we had,” a DA’s Office spokesperson said. “The investigation is continuing.”
Phu allegedly confessed the crime to his parole officer, according to the complaint against him.
“I hit someone and he’s in the hospital. I don’t know if he’s dead,” he told the officer, according to the complaint. “The police are looking for me.”
Phu and Cortes did not know each other, and there did not appear to be any interaction between them prior to the punch, police said.
The victim was leaving the Fuego Tipico Restaurant on East 188th Street near the Grand Concourse in Fordham Manor around 10:45 p.m. on Aug. 12 when he stopped near a group of people chatting outside, cops said.
Cortes, shown in surveillance footage carrying a backpack, was followed out by a balding man wearing a black T-shirt.
The man put on what appear to be work gloves — before randomly slugging the victim from behind, causing him to fall onto the sidewalk and hit his head, the footage released Wednesday shows.
Cortes was taken to Jacobi Medical Center with a skull fracture, broken cheekbone and bleeding in the brain, according to authorities.
Phu was convicted of first-degree sex abuse in The Bronx in 1995 and was sentenced to six years to life in prison, according to state records.
He was paroled in 2019 and is now registered as a Level 3 sex offender — the most serious designation — for sexually abusing the 17-year-old girl in 1994, according to state records.
Don’t let the Vietnamese name fool you – this is definitely a nigga.
I mean, apparently one of his parents is Vietnamese, or he wouldn’t have that name. It’s probably his mother, who got ditched by the black father before the birth, so he took his mother’s last name. You would almost think he had to have been born in Vietnam to get that first name. Asians usually give kids born in America an American first name.
But yeah, he’s 55, so it’s likely he was the kid of a black American soldier and a Viet hooker. He would have been born in Vietnam, and then his mother would have applied to go to the US with her US citizen anchor baby, or been brought out as a refugee when the war ended.
Weird backstory.
And the victim was a Mexican. America is a racial jungle.
But yeah – releasing a convicted felon without bail after an attack that nearly killed someone and will probably leave the victim with permanent brain damage is just normal now.
It’s really something.