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Former New York Gov. David Paterson and his stepson were reportedly attacked by five young thugs while walking their dog in New York City.

The attack occurred Friday night in NYC’s Upper East Side after Paterson and his stepson, Anthony Chester Sliwa (the son of Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa), ran into a group of young hooligans playing around on a fire escape and told them to knock it off, according to local station WNBC.

The teens then descended the fire escape, followed the pair to the corner, and attacked them, prompting the pair to flee for safety and call for help.

“Both were taken to NY-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, after suffering minor bumps and bruises,” according to WNBC.

“Paterson, 70, was hit several times during the attack … but appeared to be OK and was alert late Friday night,” the station noted. “His stepson suffered more severe cuts and bruises, and possibly a concussion, but sources said he was expected to recover.”

One of the sources was Paterson spokesperson Sean Darcy.

“They both suffered some injuries but were able to fight off their attackers,” he said in a statement. “They are currently at Cornell Hospital as a precaution. They have already filed a police report and no further information is available at this time.”

As of late Friday, no arrests had been made yet, though the police were  definitely on it:

Speaking with the Post, Sliwa’s father, Curtis, later said that the pair “had no choice but to defend themselves” when they were attacked.

“Anthony was able to hold them off because Gov. Paterson is sight-challenged but the governor was in the middle of this too and they both stood their ground,” he said, adding that he was so “proud” of how his son handled the situation.

Paterson is a Democrat who, to his credit, has been vocal about crime the past couple of years. Appearing on local radio station 770 WABC two months ago, he warned that the situation in NYC was approaching a “tipping point.”

“Look what happened at the hotels where the hotels were filled up,” he said, as reported by Fox News. “They were trying to get the excess migrants, mostly males, who couldn’t get into the hotels, and they chose to sleep on the streets instead of going to another facility.”

Appearing on the same program a week later, he stressed that crime by illegal aliens in particular was “really getting out of hand.”

“You just hear these situations you’ve never heard of before,” he said, as reported by the New York Post. “Last Tuesday, there was an 11-year-old kid who mugged a woman on the 7 train. The first thing that [people] notice is that this is a migrant. … It’s the product of a bunch of people being sent here without the city having any time to adjust to it.”

“It’s just not going to work. It’s too many people. Not every migrant is a criminal, but a sizable number of people are acting in this kind of anti-cultural fashion, and all it’s doing is alienating the citizens who live in the city who try to make the city as great as it is,” he added.

Continuing his remarks, he stressed that law enforcement needs to nip this in the bud before the crime epidemic of the mid-’70s and early ’90s repeats itself.

“After a while, people start thinking about whether or not they want to live in a place where this happens,” he said. “This is really becoming a topic that comes up when people are eating, when they’re talking to each other riding the subways.”

“There is going to have to be a real change in policy or just deployment [of more cops] to try to nip this before it gets to where it got back in the mid-‘70s and then repeated itself in the early ‘90s,” he added.

Paterson assumed office in 2008 after then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned in disgrace and became New York’s first black and legally blind governor.

Two years later, he was pressured to drop out of the 2010 gubernatorial race after The New York Times ran a bombshell story accusing him of witness tampering in a domestic abuse case involving one of his staffers, David W. Johnson.

Vivek Saxena
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