Multiple women flocked to TikTok to share their experiences of being sucker punched in the face by random strangers while strolling down New York City sidewalks.
Halley Kate, an influencer with over a million followers, posted a video last week after the altercation, saying, “You guys, I was literally just walking, and a man came up and punched me in the face.”
“I fell to the ground,” she continued after noticing a “goose egg” bump on her forehead as a result of the blow to her face.
The TikToker’s forehead “devil horn” in the clip with over 30M views worried some commenters, one of which wrote, “That’s a massive hematoma. Please say you got checked!”
She posted a follow up video sharing that she was on her way to the hospital.
“I was just walking on the sidewalk and my head was down. I was looking at my phone just sending an email. Nobody was around and I guess this man, I don’t know if he punched me or if he elbowed me, I literally passed out so I don’t really remember. I fell to the ground and I, like, literally blacked out.”
The influencer said she reported the incident to the police. “This was not the first time they were hearing that story it sounded like. So, that is good, hopefully they catch him,” she added.
A woman named Mikayla Toninato was left with a concussion, black eye and chipped tooth. after suffering an attack similar to Kate’s at West 14th Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan. The college student posted a video tagging Kate, giving an account of her experience being assaulted in the city.
“The man that hit me was a black male, definitely over 6 feet tall, he had dreads that like, didn’t quite go to his shoulder, [and] definitely looked unhoused. [He] had to have been mentally not ok if he just did that to me and walked away,” Toninato said in a follow-up video.
When speaking to a police officer about the assault, the student was told that a meth rehab center near her campus made occurrences like her attack an “every single day” thing.
“The scariest thing to me is that so many girls have reached out to me having this exact same story happen to them. I have been able to identify that this man is the same as [one] who hit a couple other girls, but what’s even scarier is there’s a lot of girls and our descriptions of this man are completely different, meaning there’s multiple men going around and doing this,” she relayed.
“I was literally like leaving class, I turned the corner and I was looking down and I was looking at my phone and texting, then, out of nowhere, this man just came up and hit me in the face,” Toninato said in her original video about the attack.
She texted her friends about the assault, and in response was sent Kate’s TikTok. “[There’s] this other girl in New York who got punched in the face and she was looking at her phone – I don’t know if this is like a thing that’s going around, [but] I guess if you’re in New York right now and you’re walking while looking at your phone, maybe don’t do that,” she added.
Oliva Brand filmed a clip on Mulberry Street in Nolita reporting her experience being striked in the head, saying “I literally just got punched by some man on the sidewalk. He goes, ‘sorry,’ and then punches me in the head. What the h**l just happened?”
‘The New York Post’ reported that the NYPD had various reports filed of similar events – from a 23-year-old woman assaulted at West 16th Street and 7th Avenue Monday morning, to a 25-year-old who was punched while walking her dog along Kenmare and Mulberry streets. Even Jill Burke, another TikToker, was attacked in the same fashion during early February near Union Square.
While the NYPD told The Post that the connection between the incidents remains unclear, the attacks resemble the “knockout game”where people pummel strangers picked at random.
The Wallflower Chronicle 
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