The two men live-streamed the Feb. 19 encounter online. In it, they approach a woman on a street corner in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, and one of the men, wearing a red “Make America Great Again” hat, demands a kiss.
The woman, who is Black, refuses the man, who is white, and he becomes belligerent, setting off a war of words in which he use racial epithets and tells her he wants to have sex with a “slave.”
He then ducks down to kiss her boots — only to burn them with a lighter.
On Thursday, the police arrested two men, Michael Santiago, 31, and Michael James, 33, in connection with the incident. The men were charged with criminal mischief, menacing and attempted assault, all as hate crimes, as well as harassment, criminal tampering and arson.
Their arraignment is pending. It was not immediately clear if the men had lawyers.
The video of the episode was posted on YouTube and other social media accounts under the handle ScrubsNYC, where Mr. James posts shaky livestreams of the pair trolling people at random. Clips show them being ejected from bodegas and making a pass at a school crossing guard.
“This video does not represent who my brother is as a person,” said Mr. James’s brother, Matthew James, who confirmed that the man in the video is his brother. His brother, he said in an interview, is an outspoken advocate of civil liberties and academic freedom who had until recently been pursing a doctorate in cancer research at Columbia University.
“That is the truth about this person,” Matthew James said. Columbia did not immediately respond to a question about Michael James’s enrollment.
The episode in Chelsea unfolded at West 26th Street and Seventh Avenue at about 3 p.m., according to the police. In it, a man whom the police identified as Mr. James can be heard cursing at the woman, using racial slurs and telling her, “You’re my slave.” At one point, he asks to kiss her fuzzy boots, and she allows him to. While crouching on the pavement, he pulls out a lighter and singes the fur, which she does not appear to notice at first. Mr. Santiago, according to the police, is filming.
“One of the individuals engaged the victim in conversation and leaned in to kiss her,” the Police Department said in a news release. “The victim pushed him away, after which the individual proceeded to make anti-Black statements toward her.”
The victim, 54, also filmed the encounter and reported the incident, the police said. After the police released images of the two men and requested public assistance in identifying them, tips flooded in, leading to their arrest, according to a police spokeswoman.
The last ScrubsNYC post is a livestream posted early Thursday that shows Mr. James and Mr. Santiago strolling in Manhattan in the dark. In the video, the two men seem to be discussing news coverage of the Feb. 19 incident; Mr. James says he plans to shave his beard and to avoid wearing his red hat in the future. A police siren sounds and one of the men says, “That’s for us,” before they start to run.
The video ends after 2 a.m., when they livestream their own arrest.
Sheelagh McNeill contributed research.
Sarah Maslin Nir is a Times reporter covering anything and everything New York … and sometimes beyond.
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