The mother of a 46-year-old woman attacked by a man wielding a pipe on Wednesday morning wants to know why her daughter’s assailant, who had been arrested for a previous random assault just a week earlier, wasn’t behind bars.
“This is not the way we should be living. The government is not supporting us,” the outraged mom told the Daily News on Friday after learning that Jeremiah White, the man who nearly killed her daughter, had been arrested on Oct. 7 for randomly punching two other women, but was set free after his arraignment.
“Attacking people for nothing and hurt them and kill them?” the mom, who wished not to be named, asked.
“This all needs to change.”
White, 23, is currently being held on $200,000 bail for assaulting the 46-year-old woman and two other females, one a 15-year-old girl, during a harrowing five-hour rampage.
The 46-year-old woman was White’s first victim on Wednesday, cops said. Police said he jumped the woman at about 5:20 a.m. at the corner of W. 176th St. and University Ave. in Morris Heights.
Police say White punched the woman in the face, claiming that his victim had hit his mother, although the victim had never interacted with the suspect or his family before.
The woman fell back onto the sidewalk. She tried to get up as White towered over her, punching her repeatedly in the face, cops said. He then grabbed a pipe lying nearby and began swinging it at her head.
The pipe hit the woman’s hands as she tried to protect her face, but a few swings connected, sending her down to the concrete again, prosecutors said.
As White ran off, EMS rushed the woman to St. Barnabas Hospital, where she needed stitches to close gashes left on her face.
“My daughter, she’s a nurse,” her mother said. “She has to take care of sick people, now it’s the other way now.”
“She was close to dying!” she said. “My daughter is not doing well. She got stitches on her head, you know, her mouth, her eyes. It’s horrible. People, they know me in the neighborhood. We live here many years. (My daughter) was raised and born here. They know my daughter. Everyone’s worried.”
White is accused of striking a 15-year-old girl with the same pipe on Louis Niñé Blvd. near E. 170th St., then punching a 54-year-old woman in the face on Franklin Ave. near Jefferson Place in Morrisania, before he was arrested, officials said.
The victim’s mom on Friday was on her way to court so she could sit in on White’s grand jury proceedings when she spoke to The News.
The earlier bust came just about a week ago.
Prosecutors said that cops arrested White on Oct. 7 for randomly punching a woman at the corner of Grand Concourse and E. 149th St. When cops took him into custody, they learned that he was also wanted for a random attack on a woman while aboard a subway train approaching the 174th St. train station at Southern Blvd. on Sept. 12.
In each case, he was charged with misdemeanor assault and harassment, criminal charges that are not bail eligible, prosecutors said.
Prosecutors handling the Oct. 7 arrest managed to get a judge to authorize supervised release for the Sept. 12 attack, meaning White was enrolled into a program where he was to routinely check in with a social worker who would make sure he was getting appropriate resources and return to court on Nov. 12 to answer to the charges.
A law enforcement source with knowledge of the case said White suffers from a mental illness. Now that he’s in custody, he will likely be ordered to undergo a psychological exam to see if it played a role in these attacks.
But none of White’s issues is enough to assuage his victim’s mother.
“The mentally ill are not getting no help,” she said. “(White) did three people in the same day. So thank God they got him already. Now they have to do justice.”
“We can’t live like this,” she said. “We can’t!”