My attack on the Manhattan Bridge: what happened and how strangers saved me

This is not an easy post to write. But it is one I have to write. Because it happened, because it changed me, and because maybe it will matter to someone reading this.

A day trip with a plan

It started the way the best days do. A simple plan and a camera bag over my shoulder.

I live outside Philadelphia. During the week I work a full-time job. Photography is my passion, not my 9 to 5. Weekends are when I come alive with a camera. Every so often I make the trip up to New York to have lunch with my uncle, who lives in the city. It's become a routine I look forward to. I arrive in the morning, spend a few hours with my camera exploring whatever corner of the city calls to me, then meet him for lunch before catching the Amtrak back. Good food, good company, and a few hours of shooting in one of the greatest cities in the world. It doesn't get much better than that.

My train pulled into Penn Station around 8 AM on a Friday.

The plan was straightforward. Take the Q down to Canal Street, spend the morning shooting in Chinatown. The color, the energy, the life of lower Manhattan. Then cross the Manhattan Bridge and end the morning in Brooklyn. My uncle and I had a reservation at Kisa, a Korean diner on Allen Street in the Lower East Side that we had been wanting to try. The day felt full of possibility.

Then I looked up at the sky.

The morning was muggy and overcast. The forecast called for rain in the afternoon. Standing at Canal Street I made a quick decision. Chinatown would keep. The colors and vibrancy I was after don't photograph the way I want them to under flat, threatening light. So I changed course. I'd cross the bridge, capture what I could along the way, and get to Brooklyn. Chinatown would be there next time.

It was a small, ordinary decision. The kind you make a dozen times on any shoot without thinking twice.

I didn't think twice.

The bridge

I had never walked the Manhattan Bridge before. I had seen it from a distance a handful of times. I had also seen photographs taken from the bridge looking down into Chinatown through the fence and I wanted to capture that for myself. This was my first time on the walking path, and it did not disappoint. It was quiet on a Friday morning around 9 AM, the way New York can surprise you sometimes. Pockets of stillness inside all that noise. A handful of joggers and walkers moved in both directions. The river was below. The city spread out around me. Even under an overcast sky, there was something to capture.

I found a spot where I could frame the Brooklyn Bridge in the distance. That classic shot, one bridge framing another. I set up. I was in that focused, narrow place that photographers know. The world reduced to what's in the viewfinder. Present. Absorbed.

That's when I heard a voice behind me.

"Let me see your photos."

I turned around. There was a man standing there. He had no camera. Nothing about him suggested any genuine interest in photography.

But I've had strangers approach me on shoots before. People are curious. Sometimes they just want to see what you're capturing. I gave him the benefit of the doubt.

I politely said no, and turned back to my camera.

"Let me see your photo."

The tone had changed. Harder. More insistent. I turned around again.

"No," I said. "What's it to you?"

What happened next, happened fast.

The attack

I found myself on both hands and knees on the ground. Just like that. No transition, no warning. One moment I was standing, the next I was down, and blood was dripping from my head onto the pavement and onto my shorts.

I got up.

The attacker swung at my face. He missed.

What happened next was brief. We were on the ground and within moments the attacker was on his feet and fleeing toward the Manhattan side of the bridge. That's when I noticed the orange backpack on his back.

I stood there. Bleeding. Shaking. Watching him go.

And then I did the only thing I could think to do.

I yelled.

"Help! I've been attacked! Someone call 911!"

The joggers and walkers nearby kept moving. I don't say that with bitterness. Shock does strange things to bystanders, and I know that now in a way I didn't then. But in that moment, standing on a bridge with blood running down my face, watching people pass without stopping, I felt completely alone.

So I started walking. Toward Manhattan. Toward more people. Toward help.

The strangers who stopped

I tried to flag down people as I walked. A couple passed me. Then another. Nobody stopped.

And then a young woman came jogging toward me. I stepped in front of her and asked for help. She was the first person who stopped.

I was shaken. I was bleeding heavily from the head wound and probably not making a lot of sense. She had a look on her face, shocked and surprised, but she listened. She got on the phone with 911 right there, while I reached into my camera bag for my handkerchief and pressed it against my head, trying to slow the bleeding.

I finally sat down. While she was on with the dispatcher, I calmly put my Fujifilm X-E3 away and pulled out a packet of disinfectant wipes from my bag and started cleaning the blood off my arms and hands. My hands were still shaking. I tried to breathe slowly and bring myself down.

I described the attacker as clearly as I could. Around 6'2". Maybe 175 pounds. Mid-thirties. I forgot to mention the orange backpack in the moment. It would turn out to be the most important detail of all.

The dispatcher called back and needed our precise location. We were on a bridge. There were no mile markers, no signs, nothing to give a specific position. Another jogger had stopped by this point and I asked him where we were. He told us we were standing above the FDR Drive.

A few minutes later, a young man came jogging toward us with something to say. He had pulled out his phone and captured photos and video of a man matching the description. The attacker's back was clearly visible in the frame, orange backpack and all.

"That's him," I told him. "That's the guy."

We were still waiting for the EMTs. Another call from dispatch asked if I could walk to the end of the bridge. I took stock of myself. The bleeding seemed to be slowing. The handkerchief was doing its job. We walked.

The EMTs and the NYPD

The NYFD EMTs met us at the end of the bridge. They were calm, professional, and thorough. They assessed my injuries quickly. Head laceration and badly scraped knees. They poured hydrogen peroxide over both knees. It burned and stung, and I watched it bubble up over the scrapes. They put me in a wheelchair and started moving me toward the ambulance.

That's when I saw them.

Two uniformed NYPD officers, one male and one female, approached me near the ambulance. They told me they had detained a suspect and asked if I could make an identification.

They had him. Surrounded by what looked like a dozen officers, down on one knee, handcuffed. His orange backpack was on the ground beside him.

I confirmed he was the man who attacked me.

Then I got into the ambulance.

The hospital

By the time I sat down inside the ambulance, the adrenaline that had been holding me together started to wear off. My knees began to truly hurt. The kind of hurt that had been waiting patiently behind the shock and the fear and the focus, and now had nowhere left to hide.

An EMT collected my personal information and medical history. A man in gym clothes, a t-shirt and shorts, stepped into the ambulance, identified himself as an NYPD officer, took my name, phone number, and ID, and left. A uniformed officer came in after and asked me to walk him through what happened. This was my first time dealing with police for anything beyond a traffic stop, so I wasn't sure what was standard. I just answered as clearly as I could.

While I was sitting in the ambulance I texted my uncle and let him know I had been attacked and was on my way to the hospital. He texted back right away. He said he would be there in an hour.

I had thought about calling my wife while I was still on the bridge waiting for the EMTs. I decided not to. I didn't want to scare her. But after texting my uncle I called her and let her know what happened. I kept the details of my injuries brief. She asked for the name of the hospital and said she would bring clothes and stay overnight in New York. I told her my uncle was already on his way and there was no need to come up. She was calm. Knowing my uncle would be at the hospital put her at ease.

At some point I could hear the attacker. Not far from the ambulance. He was not happy about what was happening to him. I'll leave it at that.

The ER was only a few minutes away. The nurse at intake had already been briefed by the EMTs, so she skipped the questions about the incident and went straight to vitals. Then she took me to a room.

A nurse came in. An older woman, maybe early sixties. She saw what I looked like. Blood-covered face, blood dried down my legs. Without a word, she brought a large towel, wet it, and started cleaning my face. Then my arms. Then she had me lie down and went to work on my knees. More peroxide, more bubbling.

I met two doctors and another nurse. Because of the head injury and the bruising on my shoulder, elbow, and knees, they ordered a CT scan of my head and neck, and X-rays on the shoulder, elbow, and both knees.

Everything came back clear. I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding.

The ER doctor gave me seven stitches to close the head laceration.

Seven stitches. I sat with that for a moment.

My uncle, Oxiclean, and lunch at Kisa

My uncle came to the ER after I reached him. He pulled up a chair and we talked, the way we always do, and it helped.

It was somewhere in the middle of all this that I looked down at my clothes and it dawned on me. They were soaked in blood. My blood. I was ready to toss them right there.

My uncle stopped me.

"Don't throw them out," he said. "Clean them with Oxiclean."

For those of you old enough to remember, yes, that Oxiclean. Billy Mays. The infomercial that seemed to run every twenty minutes on every channel. "It'll get out anything!" Seven stitches in my head and sitting in an emergency room, that's the first thing that came to mind. Sometimes that's exactly what you need.

Then I asked my uncle if he could pick up some clothes for me. There was no way I was walking around the city or getting on the Amtrak home in blood covered clothes. And there was certainly no way I was showing up at home like that to my wife. He asked me my size, pulled out his phone and started searching for something nearby. A few minutes later he said he would get the clothes and be back soon.

While I was lying in bed I canceled our reservation at Kisa. There was no way we were making noon.

I was discharged at 1:30 PM. Walking out of the hospital my uncle turned to me and said let's have lunch. He asked what I was in the mood for. Honestly, I was craving Korean BBQ. Bulgogi. So we headed to Koreatown on 32nd Street and walked into Ahgassi Gopchang. They didn't serve Bulgogi so we ended up having ribeye steaks instead. We sat down, ordered, and talked. It was exactly what I needed.

Why I wrote this

I've thought a lot about whether to share this. It's personal. It's still tender in places. But I keep coming back to the people on that bridge. The young woman who stopped when she didn't have to. The jogger who gave us our location. The man who ran after the attacker and came back with photos and video. The EMTs with their steady hands. The NYPD who had that man in handcuffs before I even got to the hospital. The nurse who cleaned the blood off my face like it was the most natural thing in the world.

These people showed up. And the least I can do is show up honestly here.

I was attacked on the Manhattan Bridge. I got banged up, scraped up, and walked away with seven stitches. But when I look at the overall outcome, I feel good about it. It could have been much worse. And when it mattered most, I was not alone.

I'm still here. I'm still shooting. Chinatown is still on my list.

And I'm deeply, permanently grateful.