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A New York City landlord blasted Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg after a homeless man with multiple open criminal offenses allegedly killed a woman inside her apartment on Sunday.
Christina Yuna Lee, 35, was stabbed to death early Sunday morning inside her apartment in the 100 block of Chrystie Street in the Chinatown neighborhood on the Lower East Side, police said. The blood-soaked suspect, identified as 25-year-old Assamad Nash, was taken into custody and evaluated at a local hospital.
NYPD detectives announced Monday that Nash had been officially charged with murder and burglary. He was expected to be arraigned in Manhattan on Monday afternoon.
"This is about the community and our elected officials need to do something much different because this was all avoidable," Brian Chin, Lee’s landlord, told reporters outside the building, according to Fox 5 N.Y.
Chin specifically criticized Bragg's policies, arguing Lee's murder could have been prevented.
"From a landlord’s perspective, from a store owner’s perspective, we’re terrified of this, his policies and what not. Armed robbery of a store is now a petit larceny? What insanity is this?" he said. "This guy, his rap sheet is a mile long, he should have been behind bars. Assault? Menacing? How is he out? This is outrageous."
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Surveillance video showed Lee dropped off at her building in a cab after a night out, Chin said.
"She opened the door, and he just slipped in right behind her. She never even knew he was there," he said, according to WNBC. "She walked up six flights of stairs and this man mercilessly stalked her."
Bragg has faced criticism over a controversial Jan. 3 memo instructing assistant district attorneys to only seek pretrial detention in "very serious cases." The memo also included a list of low-level crimes his office would no longer prosecute, including resisting arrest, skipping subway fare, prostitution, marijuana offenses, and minor traffic infractions or operating without a license.
Bragg also directed assistant district attorneys to reduce armed robbery cases to petit larcenies, barring certain circumstances. Met with backlash, he was forced to later clarify that his office would still prosecute gunpoint robberies and illegal firearm possession as felonies.
Local reports indicate Nash had at least eight prior arrests, mostly for low-level subway crimes. Three of those cases remained pending in Manhattan court, the N.Y. Daily News reported.
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His most recent arrest was on Jan. 6 on charges of criminal mischief and escaping police custody. In that incident, officers arrested Nash for allegedly disabling multiple metro card machines by jamming them with an object, Fox News Digital has learned. He later allegedly pushed open the doors of a police van and tried to escape arrest. He was due back in court on March 3.
Nash reportedly was arrested over a Sept. 28, 2021, assault after allegedly punching a man at a subway turnstile at Grand Central Station. In May of that year, he was arrested for allegedly attacking a woman, but the details of that incident remained sealed.
The New York Daily News reported that Lee's building is located across the street from Sara D. Roosevelt Park, which has attracted crime, drug users and homeless for decades. In October, a food delivery driver was stabbed to death on the street just outside the park, according to the newspaper.
This mugshot shows Assamad Nash, 25, who was taken into custody over the fatal stabbing of Christina Yuna Lee inside her sixth-floor walk-up Chinatown apartment on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. (Fox News)
"My family, we have owned this building since the 1970s, my grandparents are Chinese immigrants," Chin said, according to Fox 5 N.Y. "They came from China, they built themselves. We built up this community. And to see it get torn down so fast by one district attorney, it’s just heart-wrenching. And a disgrace to all of us in the community."
New York City Mayor Eric Adams, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand – all Democrats – condemned Lee's violent stabbing as another attack faced by the Asian American community.
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Fox News' Paul Best contributed to this report.
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