Witness recounts SF Chinatown bakery stabbing
Chinatown community leader Ding Lee was just about to help himself to coffee in AA Bakery around 9:45 a.m. Monday, as he does almost every day at the cafe on Stockton Street, when he heard the screaming.
Lee was standing at the only entrance to the bakery counter, where longtime customers serve themselves coffee, and turned to see a man he didn’t recognize holding a 6-inch knife and stabbing a female employee multiple times in the back of the neck.
“That guy is starting to kill somebody,” Lee remembers telling his friend. Within seconds, the woman ran out from behind the counter and lay on the floor, face up to the ceiling in pain, eyes closed and bleeding “like crazy,” he said.
Lee called 911 and yelled at the cafe’s owner upstairs to come down. Meanwhile, the attacker walked very slowly from behind the counter, still holding the knife, blocking the way to the door. Fearing for his own life, Lee ran back toward the kitchen and yelled at workers, urging them to protect themselves.
The owner, who had arrived downstairs, followed the man at a safe distance as he walked out of the cafe and then stopped on the sidewalk.
“From the very beginning to the end, he never said one word,” Lee said. “His face had nothing, no feeling.”
Police arrived on the scene around 9:55 a.m., about five minutes after the 911 call, and paramedics showed up around 9:58 a.m., Lee said. The Police Department said it detained a suspect but could not confirm whether an arrest had been made as of 12:45 p.m. Paramedics took the victim to a hospital, a Fire Department spokesperson said.
Lee said he didn’t know the woman’s condition. He said the woman was a part-time employee who started only two months ago. Another female employee was behind the counter during the attack and was scared but safe, he said.
Lee said he didn’t notice the man enter the store and pass in front of him and didn’t see or hear him say anything before the attack. A community leader and the former president of the San Francisco Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, Lee said he was shocked by the incident because Chinatown is quite peaceful and he comes to the cafe almost every day.
“We know each other very well,” he said. “We’re like a family there.”
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
