A man is accused of threatening to slit a Muslim police officer’s throat in New York City Saturday, after assaulting her 16-year-old son, and shouting “go back to your country.”
While off-duty in Brooklyn, Officer Aml Elsokary, who joined the police force following the 9/11 attacks, came across Christopher Nelson pushing and shouting at her teenage son, according to ABC News.
After Elsokary moved to defend her offspring, the man allegedly said he would slit her throat and made reference to the Islamic State.
“I became a police officer to show the positive side of a New Yorker, a Muslim woman, that can do the job,” Elsokary explained at news conference on Monday. “I help everybody, no matter what your religion, what’s your faith, what you do in New York. I’m born and raised here.”
Nelson was arraigned Monday and is being charged with a felony of menacing as a hate crime.
Elsokary, who is a mother of five, is known as a hero after saving a baby from a burning building in 2014. Just a day before the valiant deed, another New York police officer died from his injuries after responding to a similar fire-related emergency.
“Going in, the events on Sunday were very much on my mind,” Elsokary said in 2014, according to then-Police Commissioner Bill Bratton. “But I had to help. I could hear the baby crying.”
Police Commissioner James O’Neill and Mayor Bill de Blasio referenced this courageous act at the Monday news conference.
“In 2014, she ran into a burning building and helped to save a young girl and her grandmother. And, then, on Saturday, she had to experience a man allegedly yelling at her and her son, ‘Go back to your country,'” said de Blasio, according to ABC News. “Well this is Officer Elsokary’s country. She is an American. She is a New Yorker. She’s already at home.”
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