A great-grandmother who suffered a massive head injury when she was shoved unprovoked face-first into the sidewalk near Union Square Park is slowly recovering — while Paris Valentine, the stranger accused of attacking her, has been released on bail.
The victim is now able to communicate with her family after spending two week in a medically-induced coma in the intensive care unit following the June 1 Manhattan attack.
“As far as we know, she’s had no brain damage,” said the victim’s 68-year-old son-in-law. “This is an 85-year-old woman. She’s really had a miraculous recovery considering the damage.”
The victim made it through surgery that removed half her skull to relieve pressure on her brain, relatives said.
“She has a very long way to go,” her 59-year-old daughter said. “She’s not up and walking and talking. She’s still in the hospital. We’re hoping (she’ll be released) in the next couple of days, but only to a rehab facility. That could be a month (there), that could be three months.”
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The victim was near her home when the suspect, Paris Valentine, allegedly shoved her from behind near Union Square Park East and E. 16th St., police sources said. (Shutterstock)
Word of the victim’s tentative recovery comes as the young woman accused of attacking her, Valentine, has been released from Rikers Island after making bail.
Valentine, 29, is facing assault charges for the unprovoked attack. She was arrested moments after the shoving and initially ordered held without bail when she was arraigned in Manhattan Criminal Court. But a judge at a later hearing set bail at $10,000.
Valentine was released after making bail on June 11, public records show.
The victim, a self-made woman who began her own company out of her garage when in her 40s, was born in Brooklyn but eventually moved to the suburbs to raise her family.
But she loved New York so much she moved back to the city once her kids were grown and now lives near Union Square. She has two grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
As she slowly recovers at Bellevue Hospital, she has been both lucid and confused in equal measure, her son-in-law said. One of her biggest bouts of confusion comes when her family tries to explain that she was the victim of a random attack.
“Why would someone do that to me?” she asks, according to her family.
“She doesn’t understand how you can do that to somebody,” her son-in-law said. “I just don’t know what justice there is. This is a person who deserves some justice.”
The victim had just gotten off an MTA bus, one she often takes with her two grandchildren, when Valentine stormed up to her and allegedly shoved her onto the sidewalk about 12:30 p.m.
The suspect’s mother previously told The News her daughter has bipolar disorder and stopped taking her medication some time before the assault.
“I just don’t know why she did this,” the suspect’s mother, Loretta Valentine said. “She’s a good person with a kind heart. I really just don’t know what happened.”
On Tuesday night, a woman inside Valentine’s family home in Flatbush, Brooklyn, called the cops on a News reporter hoping to interview the recently-freed assault suspect.
As they await Valentine’s next court date on July 20, the victim’s family is hoping the octogenarian can bounce back.
“Every day we hold our breath in terms of her recovery. It’s not linear,” the son-in-law said. “There were times when we thought, ‘Oh my god, she’s fantastic!’ And then we come in the next day and it’s a different person, just asleep, not really responsive.”
“(She wants) to know how much I paid for the club we were at, which was Bellevue,” he added. “(The doctors) didn’t see any outward signs of damage, but there was pressure on the brain. I would be stunned if there isn’t some deficit. It may not be something noticeable to strangers, but people who knew her and knew how sharp she was.”
Valentine is a full-time psychology student at CUNY with no history of violence, nor a criminal record, her attorney said during her arraignment. She said Valentine was carrying a school textbook and walking her dog through Union Square Park when the attack occurred and that she comes from a stable home. Her mother is a full-time employee of the city.
Prior to the assault, Valentine had been arrested at least three times for a string of clashes with residents at a Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, apartment building where she lived until she was evicted for not paying rent last December, police sources said.
The three arrests were ultimately dismissed and sealed, the sources said.
“(My mother) had her life that she once had taken away from her and now she’s going to spend however many months trying to rebuild some sort of life again,” the victim’s daughter said. “While Paris gets to live her life with really no ramifications … She has a little mark on her record and that’s it.”
The family fears their matriarch will continue to suffer.
“The one thing she never had, being a real consummate New Yorker, was a fear of New York,” the victim’s son-in-law said. “I think she has that now.”
