Two men were arrested after having been sought by police for nearly a week for allegedly making racist comments toward a woman in Manhattan and setting her shoes on fire.<\/p>\n
The pair were near the corner of West 26th Street and 7th Avenue in Chelsea when they approached a 54-year-old woman just before 3 p.m. on Feb. 19, according to police. One of the men talked to the woman and tried to kiss her.<\/p>\n
The woman refused the kiss, which led to one of the men making anti-Black statements towards her, police said. As she tried to walk away, the two men stopped her, waving a lighter and lighting her boots on fire, according to police.<\/p>\n
The woman fled from the location, while the men remained at the scene. <\/p>\n
The incident sparked an investigation by the NYPD’s Hate Crime Task Force, and led to an arrest during the early morning Thursday. The duo \u2014 identified as 31-year-old Michael Santiago and 33-year-old Michael James \u2014 were taken into custody and face multiple charges including attempted assault, criminal mischief and arson.<\/p>\n
Attorney information for the two was not immediately available.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Two men were arrested after having been sought by police for nearly a week for allegedly making racist…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":146898,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[3294,75,84,83,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-146897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-crime-and-courts","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146897\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}