An armed private security guard was seen on video tackling a random cyclist in a Manhattan bike lane this week, after apparently picking a fight with a young man on an electric unicycle.
The bizarre attack was caught on video Tuesday night by Vincenzo Tran, as he was riding his motorized unicycle on 6th Avenue near 20th Street. Tran told Streetsblog that the man — an employee with the security firm Harvard Protection Services — wandered into the bike lane while staring at his phone, then began shouting racial slurs at him.
Tran begins filming as he confronts the man.
"What is this? This is a car. This is a street," the older man shouts, pointing to his parked security vehicle and the adjacent painted bike lane. "YOU have to watch out for ME!"
"No this is a bike lane dickhead," Tran replies.
"No you are a dickhead," the man fires back. "You don't know the rules of the road."
The two bicker for a bit longer about whether the security guard has the right to wander aimlessly into a bike lane. Then, without warning, the guard lunges after a separate cyclist, who'd passed him while he was standing in the bike lane.
The enraged guard throws the cyclist from his bike and appears to punch him in the face. A few nearby cyclists quickly pull him off. As the security guard is rolling on the ground, the video shows a concealed handgun beneath his jacket.
"That's a young ass kid what the fuck is wrong with you?" one bystander can be heard saying. "You're an old ass man."
The security guard then walks away, assuming a confrontational stance in the bike lane.
“The kid was crying and he took off,” Tran told Streetsblog.
Toni Spinazzola, a human resources employee with the New Jersey-based Harvard Protection Services, told Gothamist that the company is aware of the video, but is still "gathering all the information and looking into it."
"We'll deal with it as quickly as we can," she said.
Where's Sean Avery when we need him?
