SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) – While Anh ‘Peng’ Taylor was recovering from the wounds she suffered in a brutal attack on a street in San Francisco on Thursday, her family began details of their amazing journey from war-torn Southeast Asia to the Bay Area to share.
The 94-year-old was born in Haiphong in 1926 of Chinese and Vietnamese descent. She immigrated to Laos later in life when Vietnam was involved in a war. She worked as a cook in a restaurant she owned, where she met her future husband. They married in Bangkok and lived there for a few years before moving to Hawaii and then to San Francisco in the early 1970s.
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Her husband, a US war veteran, died almost two years ago. She has lived in the same apartment in San Francisco’s criminal Tenderloin neighborhood for 45 years, taking her daily walks and waving to her neighbors.
On Wednesday at 10.15 a.m., she was allegedly attacked in Block 800 on Poststrasse by 35-year-old Daniel Cauich, who was taken into custody two hours later.
She was stabbed in the wrist, suffered additional cuts and was hit in the head. According to the police, she did nothing to provoke the attack. Taylor just took her daily walk.
“She only takes short walks with her stick, she doesn’t bother anyone,” says friend and neighbor Miranda Benvenuti. “She gives us cookies.”
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“It’s just sad that someone (the suspect) is such a monster and so cruel,” added Benvenuti.
Her niece spoke to Betty Yu from KPIX 5 and told her that from her hospital bed, her aunt asked her, “Why should this happen to me?”
It wasn’t immediately known whether Taylor was targeted for her race or a casual victim in a crime-ridden neighborhood. But since the COVID-19 pandemic began, violence against Asian Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area has increased astonishingly.
There have been dozens of attacks, some fatal, in Oakland, San Francisco and South Bay.
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According to a report by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, released June 1, 12 hate crimes were committed against Asian Americans in San Francisco in the first quarter of 2021 – a 140 percent increase from the first Quarter of 2020.
