Man who chased down attempted murderer explains how he ended up becoming friends with the victim
Thomas Bamford
Featured Image Credit: (Photo by Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images)
Jayson Cross was just picking up his dry cleaning on a New York street when a man with a brick walked past him and nearly killed a German tourist.
Cross was 39 years old and in the best shape of his life when it happened.
Boxing four or five days a week and running two to three miles a day, he was on his way to the gym with a friend in 2018 when he stopped at the dry cleaner's on 38th Street in Hell's Kitchen.
He had lived in New York for 20 years after growing up on the South Side of Chicago, and that upbringing had given him one ingrained habit: always look both ways when you step outside.
Advert
When he stepped out of the dry cleaner, he looked left, and saw a man walking towards him carrying a large brick in both hands, which Cross says was seven inches long, four to five inches wide, and three inches thick.
Speaking to the What Was That Like podcast, he said his instincts kicked in immediately.
"When I first noticed the attacker holding the brick, my immediate thought was defense. That instinct may have come from my boxing background or simply from growing up on the South Side of Chicago.
"My first concern was not allowing him to get too close and thinking through what I would do if the situation escalated into a physical confrontation."
He handed his dry cleaning to his friend, moved him out of the way, and dropped into a bladed boxing stance, chin tucked, hands up, side-on to the man, making himself as small a target as possible.
The man with the brick saw it instantly and kept his distance.
He looked at Jayson and said: "Nah, I'm going to hit a white motherf**ker with this brick." Then he kept walking.
Jayson initially took it as the ranting of someone with mental health issues. But he didn't turn his back.
He tracked the man with his eyes until the attacker was about 15 feet past him, and that's when a man in a burnt orange hoodie came walking in the opposite direction, head down, hands in his pockets. He never saw what was coming.
"He picked the brick up over his head the same way you would try to strike a nail with a hammer if you wanted to hit it with intense force," Jayson said. "He struck him on the left side of his chin, and he went down like a ton of bricks."
The attacker hit him again. Jayson started towards him. He hit him again. More blood. Bystanders who were closer to the attack screamed for someone to stop it, but nobody moved.
"I thought distinctly to myself: if someone, i.e. me, doesn't stop this, this guy is going to die right in front of my eyes," Jayson said.
On the final blow, the brick cracked clean in half. The attacker threw it down and ran. Jayson scooped up the smaller piece, fielding it cleanly, like a shortstop, and sprinted after him at full speed.
He briefly considered hurling it at the fleeing man before thinking better of it. He kept running, keeping the man in his eyeline as they both cut through traffic.
They passed the same mounted police officer Jayson had clocked on the way to the dry cleaner, still sitting on his horse while bystanders fed it nuts.
Jayson shouted at him to help. The officer radioed for backup but stayed on the horse, he explained to Jayson later at the grand jury that releasing a police horse in the middle of Times Square could have caused far worse chaos. At the time, Jayson was furious.
Half a block into the chase, the attacker suddenly threw himself flat on the ground, arms out wide, face up, spread-eagle like a starfish. As police closed in behind him, he looked up at Jayson and said: "You witnessing, bro?"
Speaking to UNILAD, Jayson said: "A lot went through my head. My first thought was: he had just nearly killed someone, so of course I would witness. I also wondered if he believed the rest of us, as Black people, shared the same hatred he did or thought his actions were justified."
The attacker then claimed he couldn't breathe and hadn't taken his medication, invoking almost word-for-word the final words of Eric Garner, who died after being restrained by New York police years earlier. Jayson believed he was making a mockery of it. The man was handcuffed and taken to Bellevue psychiatric hospital.
Back at the ambulance, Jayson found the victim, a German tourist, as it turned out, sitting with something pressed against his face to stop the bleeding. He had been struck with the brick three, four, maybe five times.
Jayson apologized for not getting there sooner. The man looked confused. "For what?" he said.
After the DA's office called Jayson several months later to discuss charging the attacker with assault, he told them exactly what the man had said to him on the street.
The charge was upgraded to attempted murder with a hate crime enhancement, punishable by 25 years to life in New York state.
The attacker took a plea deal of ten years. He later appealed, representing himself in court, and ended up with 14. He is due for release in March 2030.
Some people in Jayson's circle had told him not to testify. He ignored them.
He said: "At the end of the day, I always intended to testify. I knew the attacker would remain a danger to others if he stayed on the street."
Jayson had learned German at a language academy as a child. Sitting beside the ambulance that day, he heard the victim's accent and asked: "Sind Sie Deutsch?" (are you German?) The man said yes. They have been friends ever since.
Jayson said: "The victim and I have become friends since the incident. Since then, we have stayed in touch. Every year, on the anniversary of the attack, we check in with one another. We also search online to make sure the attacker is still in custody."
This year, that search turned up something that stopped them both cold.
"This year, in 2026, we discovered that he had been accused of another murder in Minnesota," Jayson told UNILAD.
"The news hit both of us hard. We were overwhelmed by a mix of shock, stress, and disbelief.
"It was disturbing to realize that the person who had nearly taken a life years ago was once again being connected to such a violent crime."
His DNA, taken at arrest and run through the national database, had flagged him as a suspect in the stabbing death of a woman in Minnesota around 2013 or 2014. He may go straight from a New York prison to face that charge.
Jayson told us he wasn't entirely surprised.
"During the attack, I saw what I would describe as a bloodlust in his eyes. Growing up, I had seen that look before, the look of someone who seems to derive satisfaction from hurting another person.
"It wasn't anger alone; it felt like something darker. That impression stayed with me long after the attack ended."
He has since been turning the whole story into stand-up material, no easy task, he admits, for something that begins with a racial slur and almost ended with a man's death on a New York pavement.
Richard Pryor, he points out, wrote his funniest ever bit about setting himself on fire. If Pryor could do that, Jayson figures he can do this.