New video captures the harrowing moment a gang of angry citizens surrounded a man suspected of brutally slashing an 11-year-old girl in the head with a box cutter.
In the video, 30-year-old Shaquan Cummings, who also allegedly beat a 43-year-old woman during his bloody crime spree on Friday afternoon, is cornered by a crowd of angry Harlem residents.
A legion of NYPD officers rebuff the angry citizens, pushing them back and forming a ring around the alleged slasher, who cowers behind them in fear.
A text appears on the screen saying, “They finally caught him!!!”
Desperate officers stand shoulder to shoulder trying to protect Cummings, who has more than two dozen arrests under his belt, as the crowd seethes and rushes toward him.
At one point in the video, an angry citizen stabs Cummings with his baton.
“Back up!” an officer shouts in a hoarse voice to the crowd.
Tired of the crime plaguing their neighborhood, the residents of Harlem appear ready to take the law into their own hands.
“Don’t let him go!” someone from the crowd shouts.
Another officer rushes into the fray and stands in front of the suspect.
“You’re defending a damn criminal,” shouts one resident.
On Friday around 2:18 p.m., Cummings allegedly attacked an 11-year-old girl with a box cutter just outside the 116th Street 6 subway station.
Cummings allegedly stabbed the child in the back of the head, cutting her ear as she walked down the street holding her mother’s hand.
The child reportedly felt something on the back of her head, and when her mother, Gorzata Sladek, turned around, she saw “a box cutter.”
Cummings allegedly ducked into a subway train after the attack and escaped, even as Sladek chased the attacker.
‘Horrible. It’s terrible to see a little girl whose head has been cut in half,” the victim’s mother told the newspaper New York Post.
A UPS worker who saw doctors treating the injured girl said she was “scared and crying.”
He continued, “Her head [was] bloody. Bleeding cannot stop. [She was] bleeding in her hand and her shirt… she was crying. Anxious.’
After the brutal attack, the girl underwent intensive surgery that required numerous staples and stitches to close the wound.
But the emotional scars remain, the mother said. She called the terrifying episode “traumatizing.”
‘She’s not doing well emotionally. She doesn’t want to go to school anymore. She doesn’t want to go out anymore,” Sladek said.
After brutally attacking Sladek’s 11-year-old child, Cummings was picked up by authorities just a block away, where he allegedly attacked a 43-year-old woman earlier in the afternoon.
The woman refused to undergo medical treatment.
On Friday evening, Cummings was charged with two counts of assault and acting in a manner harmful to a child.
Shaquan Cummings, 30, allegedly hit an 11-year-old girl in the head with a box cutter on Friday afternoon after punching a woman during a brutal crime spree. Later, Cummings was surrounded by an angry mob, from whom police had to protect him
Cummings’ more than 20 previous arrests include assault, criminal mischief and fare evasion.
His most recent arrest was just two months ago for assault.
In a statement to the Post, Sladek expressed his frustration with the violence in the streets – a sentiment shared by the angry crowd that surrounded Cummings.
”You should be able to walk down the street and not worry that someone is going to attack you. It is not the event that attacks a dog, but a small child.”