Happened Yesterday!!


New Yorkers are debating whether the city is growing heartless in the face of crime after at least 25 (New York) people walked past a homeless man bleeding to death in the street and failed to come to his assistance.


Shocking footage of the death of Hugo Tale-Yax, a Guatemalan aged 31, was captured on CCTV cameras in the Jamaica area of Queens. The video, put up on the website of the New York Post, shows pedestrians walking and cycling past the man during the course of more than an hour as he lay in a pool of blood on the pavement.

The footage begins at about 5.40am on the morning of Sunday 18 April when a woman wearing a jacket and skirt is seen walking along the pavement. She is being followed by man in a green short-sleeve shirt who comes up to her from behind. Though it is out of camera, it is assumed that Tale-Yax came to the help of the woman as she was being attacked by the man.

The video camera then captures the attacker fleeing in the direction in which he had come, followed a few seconds later by Tale-Yax who appears to be chasing him but stumbles on the pavement and falls.

He lies there, face down, in a gathering pool of blood, having been stabbed several times in the chest with a knife.

Several people then walk by, looking down at Tale-Yax but failing to stop.

At one point two men come out from a side building and stand around him, apparently discussing him; one of them is visible taking a picture of the victim with his mobile phone.

Later, a passerby does stop and lifts Tale-Yax's head and shakes him, then lifts his arm up, as if to see if he is alive. The passerby then turns and walks away.   - Seriously waheguru?


It is not until 7.23am, more than an hour after the victim collapsed, that emergency services are called.

The apparent callousness of members of the public to Tale-Yax's plight has caused some hand-wringing on the part of New Yorkers. The New York Post dubbed the victim a good Samaritan and a "slain hero".

There has been comparison to another notorious murder in Queens in 1964 when a young woman called Kitty Genovese was stabbed in the street as she came home early one morning to her apartment block. More than 10 people in the vicinity heard her repeated screams but failed to respond.