Florida woman indicted on hate crime charges after pepper spraying Asian women in NYC
By Sonia Moghe, CNN
A Florida woman accused of pepper spraying four Asian women while yelling xenophobic comments was indicted on 12 hate crime charges, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office announced Thursday.
Madeline Barker, 47, was indicted on eight counts of assault in the third degree as a hate crime and four counts of aggravated harassment in the second degree, a misdemeanor hate crime, a news release from District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s Office said.
Thursday’s indictment includes five more assault charges than Barker faced at her arraignment last month.
Barker remains in custody in New York. CNN has reached out to her attorney for comment.
Prosecutors say that on June 11, Barker allegedly sprayed a group of four Asian women who had been standing on a Manhattan street, allegedly confronting them for standing near where she was sitting, a news release said.
“Hearing the hateful and discriminatory words, ‘go back to your country’ is deeply painful and these women allegedly heard them before enduring the physical pain of Ms. Barker’s pepper spray,” Bragg said in a statement.
The indictment comes on the heels of another hate crimes indictment announced Wednesday by Bragg’s office, against a man accused of attacking two women of Korean descent inside a Rockefeller Center subway station while yelling anti-Asian slurs.
In the six months since Bragg took office, he has secured $1.7 million in funding to expand the office’s hate crimes unit, and the office hopes to hire more investigative analysts, assistant district attorneys and increase language capacity, a spokeswoman said.
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