[JPhillips]

This will be interesting to see how it plays out in NY.

Yesterday afternoon an African-American couple was eating at the outside tables at Benny’s Burrito in Greenwich Village when a drunken man, complaining about his wife leaving him and his job at Goldman Sachs, crashed their table. Douglass Reddish, 25, the man with his girlfriend, tried to help the man steady himself but got a different response than he likely expected.

“This nigger wants to fight me?” said the unidentified man according to witnesses at the scene, “You niggers are why I lost my job!”

Reddish clocked the man with a punch to his face which knocked him out cold. The back of the man’s head then struck the concrete and started to bleed profusely.

“He was out cold. I thought he was dead,” said Robert Garcia, a worker at the restaurant.

On seeing the extent of the man’s wounds, Reddish attempted to flee the scene but was later arrested by police and charged with assault.

The unidentified man, believed to be in his 30s, remains in critical condition at Beth Israel Medical Center.