A New Jersey man violently verbally and physically attacked a man on a New Jersey bus on May 2. The suspect was arrested and charged this week with bias intimidation, terroristic threats and aggravated assault with a weapon.
In the video, you can see and hear as Victor Colon, 51, out of nowhere and seemingly without provocation started screaming at another male passenger who hasn’t been identified. He is a young man with black hair though his actual ethnicity is unknown.
Colon started stomping on his foot and asking him if he was Indian. Colon also spit on him and threatened him with a boxcutter which didn’t touch the young man but did cut his backpack. Colon blamed the passenger for 9/11 and the alleged death of his father and threatened to kill him.
“My father died, 9-11. A firefighter because of your f—— people,” Colon screamed at the man.
Colon told the bus driver to stop the bus and literally kicked the young man off, telling him he was going to kill him if he didn’t leave the bus right away. The bus was on Route 4 eastbound in Paramus, NJ.
Police found Colon after they watched the video. He is currently in Bergen County Jail awaiting a bail hearing.
New Jersey has recently seen a terrifying increase in bias and hate crimes mirroring the national increase. 417 reported hate crimes were in New Jersey in 2016, a nearly 14 percent increase over the prior year. The most recent statistics available that track hate crimes are for 2016.
The number of hate crimes in New Jersey had been declining over several years before the spike in 2016.
