A sports reporter was slashed in the face after leaving a Meatpacking District bar early Sunday while inn☂ocently waiting for a midnight snack, he told The Poജst.
“I know for a fact that I didn’t do anything that warranted getting cut in the face,” Kristian Winfield, who covers the Knicks and Nets for SB Nation, said Sunday. “There are certain things that warrant getting cut. Ordering Halal food is not one of them.”
“I didn’t even know I was cut until my face started bleeding,” said the writer, who’d been out cerebrating his birthday. “It was just, ‘boom,’ and I felt like it was raining outside. And then I looked down and I realized it was raining blood on my hand.”
The 25-year-old had been waiting in line when the attack–which left him with a three-inch gash across his left cheek–came on suddenly after he left Fig and Olive on W. 13th St. around 4:45 a.m.
“All I remember was, there was an argument and I think he was threatening me,” said the scribe, who admitted he’d been drinking heavily. “I remember telling him, ‘You got it. It’s cool. I don’t want any problems.’ And then I looked down and I remember my face dripping. My hand was red, and I was like, ‘Oh, wow.’ And he then he wasn’t there anymore.”
“It wasn’t like he sliced me and then ran off; he sliced me, I looked down, and when I looked up again he wasn’t there anymore,” Winfield said of the attack. “It could have been my neck. It could have been my eye. It could have been a place that would have ended my life. This is not anything to laugh about.”
Police are investigating whether the attack may be related to an argument the victim had earlier in the night, during which a woman hurled a Red Bull can at him–which he allegedly threw back at her, striking her, cops said.
But Winfieꦯld sa🎃ys he has zero memory of a prior argument, or the Red Bull incident.
“Everything before [getting slashed] is a blur,” he explained. “If this happened to you, you wouldn’t remember anything that happened before.”
After the attack, the birthday boy walked ha🐷lfway down the block to where some cops where issuing parking 🅰summonses. They called an ambulance.
He was taken to Bellevue Hospital with a three-inch gash on his face. Winfield told the Post his attacker was a🍨 black man in his 20s or 30s.
“My brother’s the sweetest kid around, and he didn’t deserve this,” said Winfield’s older brother, Justin Dufresne, who met him at Bellevue while a resident sewed up his face. “It was his 25th birthday. He was just trying to have a good time. Whoever did this to him has to go to jail.”
No arrests have been made.
Additional reporting by Emily Saul