‘DEFEND MY LIFE’

L.A. Attack Against Korean-American Vet Under Investigation as Hate Crime

Denny Kim said he was “terrified for my life” when two men beat him and yelled racial slurs at him a week ago.

Police are investigating an attack against a 27-year-old Air Force veteran that occurred in Los Angeles a week ago as a possible hate crime. Denny Kim, who is Korean-American, was beaten, threatened and repeatedly called racial slurs by two men in the city’s Koreatown neighborhood. “I was terrified for my life, as you can see from the physical injuries on my face,” Kim said in an interview with NBC Los Angeles. He bore a visible black-eye and a fractured nose. “And I didn’t know what to think of it. It was all just a blur... I was just trying to defend my life.” Kim’s friend Joseph Cha managed to chase the attackers off. Cha said that as he yelled at the attackers to stop, they began “calling me racial slurs too.” There have been over 3,000 recorded incidents of anti-Asian hate crimes in the U.S. since the beginning of the pandemic, and both experts and elected officials fear that number may be an undercount.