Public Safety
LAPD Arrests Man Accused of Punching Two Women at Hot Dog Stand
A man accused of punching two women in a confrontation caught on camera at a downtown Los Angeles hot dog stand has been arrested.
Arka Sangbarani Oroojian, 30, turned himself in to police Tuesday night and was booked on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon, police said. The Sylmar resident’s bond was set at $90,000.
Jail records did not indicate an initial court date. It was not immediately clear whether Oroojian has an attorney.
Video of the altercation shows a man hurling punches at the women on a busy sidewalk before running off through traffic and down the street. One of two young women seen in a video as onlookers watched late Friday night in downtown Los Angeles says she was astounded that nobody did anything to help.
The woman, whom NBC4 is not naming to protect her identity, was out with her friend when they stopped for street hot dogs. She said they noticed a man being rude to a hot dog vendor over the $6 cost.
She said another vendor offered the man a free hot dog, but when he did not stop, the woman and her friend spoke up.
“Me and my friend said something like, ‘Just leave.'”
The woman said he punched both of them at least once before additional blows were recorded by a bystander’s cellphone camera.
“This guy brutally punched two women at a hot dog stand,” LAPD wrote on Twitter. “Someone knows him, and we would like to be one of those people.”
Video shows the man striking the two women who struggled to get back up and try to strike back, only to be knocked down again before he bolted into traffic on Spring Street St. and disappeared heading toward Sixth St. The block where it happened is home to several popular taverns and a disco that draw crowds on weekend nights.
The woman–a nursing student who also works as a therapist for children on the autism spectrum–suffered a bruise to her jaw. Her friend was also injured. Another friend drove them to a downtown hospital where they were treated and released. Los Angeles Police took a report later Saturday.
The video was posted on the Facebook Page DTLA Town Square and quickly garnered hundreds of comments. The online conversation veered from denouncing the man’s violence to questioning the women for trying to fight back against a man who appeared to outweigh both of them put together. Midday Monday the posting was pulled, though the video had already been widely shared.
Mike Watson of Long Beach, who identified himself as the father of one of the women in a Facebook post that included the video on Sunday, wrote that the women intervened when the man “was causing a scene about the price” of a hot dog.
“Eventually, one of the vendors tells this guy, who is clearly wanting to start a fight with someone, to just take the hot dog and leave,” Watson wrote. “The guy would not leave the hot dog guy alone. (The women) said something to him in attempts to get him to leave thus, standing up for the vendor.”
The video doesn’t show how the assault begins.
Even more so than the man who struck them, the woman says she was troubled by the behavior of the bystanders, who could be heard on the video–laughing and yelling as if it were a show, is how she characterized it–but no one trying to stop the burly man’s punches, or following him when he ran off, or even checking on the condition of the young women on the sidewalk.
“It upsets me nobody did anything,” she said.
By: NBC Palm Springs
January 29, 2019
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