Israeli woman and young child brutally beaten in NY home invasion

The police said there is no evidence of it being a hate-based crime.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

An Israeli woman and her young child were beaten by several men who broke into their Staten Island home Monday night, in what the New York police are calling a straightforward robbery, not a hate crime.

The home invasion was caught on cameras situated in the house, and four masked, armed robbers can be seen searching the rooms, which had Jewish ritual objects called “mezuzot” on the door lintels, indicating that the family was religious.

The 33-year-old mother of the family told the New York Post that one of the men entered her bedroom, turned on the light, put a gun to her head and demanded money. When they couldn’t find any cash after she said there may be some in a closet, one of them slammed her face into its door frame, she said.

Another criminal brought the realtor’s five-year-old daughter and 54-year-old nanny into her room. Although the nanny was untouched, she said there was “a huge bruise” on her daughter’s face. The gunmen did not find her four-year-old son, who slept through the entire violent episode.

Her husband was not home that night, and she said that the robbers knew it, which was “the scary part” of the whole incident.

After rifling through the house, the group took off with a cellphone.

The injured victims were treated in a local hospital for cuts and bleeding, and the child was diagnosed with a concussion following a CAT scan.

“The mom suffer[ed] a laceration to her head from being hit with a gun and the five-year-old female [was] somehow struck in the face,” when the gang couldn’t find the money and jewelry they demanded, New York Police Department (NYPD) Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny told reporters Tuesday.

He added that the men didn’t “seem to know what they’re doing,” although “they had no problem pistol-whipping an innocent woman in front of her child and hitting that child to the point she gained a concussion and she was vomiting.”

While taking the incident extremely seriously, the NYPD told Ynet that “there is no indication that this is a hate crime, and it appears to be a random target.”

The local Israeli community did not leap to any conclusions about the robbers’ motives, saying only that it was “shocked by the videos that look like the stuff of horror movies. Only barbarians could beat a woman and a girl like that.”

The woman’s sister said that she had been left “traumatized,” and her husband said that “the whole neighborhood is terrified.”

A Jewish neighborhood watch group put the house under 24/7 surveillance, and a $10,000 reward has been offered to anyone providing information that would lead to the perpetrators’ arrest.

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