A 19-year-old woman said that she is “afraid to leave the house at night” after being assaulted by a group of youth yelling “get her phone.”
Chloe Miller was on her way to the corner store on August 27 with her mother and sister when she was assaulted on a street in South Norwood, London, leaving her concussed and covered in severe bruises.
Miss Miller was punched and kicked to the ground by the gang, as evidenced by social media video footage.
New video from earlier in the evening shows attackers blatantly ransacking a neighbouring newsagent before attacking the young woman on the street.
Miss Miller said: ‘There were already loads of people out there, we’d seen they’d been trashing shops and heard the police sirens.
‘I’d been in my house chilling, but we live right near the shop, so me, my mum and my sister had gone over to check on the shop owner and I literally just went to buy a bottle of cherry coke and some sour watermelons.
‘On the way back though, someone hit me with a crutch, so I turned around and was like ‘why are you hitting random people with a crutch it’s not right’ and all of a sudden, I was just getting attacked for no reason. They took my phone and everything.’
The young woman told MyLondon ‘about 20 people’ piled on top of her, knocking her over before ‘kicking and stomping on her’.
She added: ‘I remember someone shouting, ‘get her phone, get her vape’ and my vape was in between my top in my bra so some guy reached down my top to take that.
‘I ended up in hospital with really badly bruised ribs, concussion and multiple bruises all over my body, a black eye.
‘I was so scared. At the end of the day I was getting stamped out and punched and kicked and my phone was taken and that had a lot of sentimental value to me and memories on it.’
She is shown attempting to shield her head while being unable to protect herself since she is being hit from all sides.
Officers of the law came on the scene and cleared the street of crowds.
A woman is repeatedly kicked and punched in the head by a group outside a shop yesterday, it is believed to be on Portland Road in South Norwood. Crowds dispersed when police arrived. https://t.co/Ju7SzBnKBw #fyp #news pic.twitter.com/He5B23Nev1
— Scarcity News (@ScarcityStudios) August 29, 2022
Miss Miller added: ‘Everyone scattered when the police came, they called an ambulance for me, and they’ve said they’re doing a full investigation.
‘But because a lot of them were all in balaclavas and masks we couldn’t really get a close eye on who they were.’
New video uploaded on social media yesterday night shows a group of youths breaking into and robbing a newsstand near where Miss Miller was assaulted.
The youth are seen toppling stands containing candies and lottery tickets before stuffing their hands with frozen foods and liquor.
One young woman wearing a blue long-sleeved shirt can be seen fleeing to the rear of the store and observing as the group enters the establishment.
She is shown attempting to converse with the other youths before retiring with her hands covering her face when additional guys, including several wearing baklavas, enter the scene.
Then, other youngsters are shown entering the newsstand and tossing stuff from the freezer.
A shopkeeper said that the thieves had shattered the store’s doors and windows to gain inside.
One of the staff at the Yogi Newsagents on Tennison Road, a little distance from the location of the altercation, said that they had seen the altercation before its occurrence.
The shop worker, who asked not to be named, told MyLondon: ‘Around 10 or 15 of them came inside and were stealing sweets, stealing alcohol, trying to get into the back. There were hundreds outside.
‘We tried to force them out and put the shutters down and they started breaking things, smashing the doors and windows, they’re broken now so it’s a lot of damage and we don’t know when it will be fixed.
‘It was about 15 or 20 minutes until the police arrived and they ran off.’
Miss Miller added that London was becoming a ‘very, very bad place’ to live in.
She said: ‘People just need to stop doing all this. London’s getting to be a very very bad place.
‘I can’t go out now, I had to call up my doctor and get my medication changed again, it’s affected me a lot.
‘I definitely wouldn’t be able to go out at that time of night again now, even in my own street.’
‘Officers attended and it was reported that a 19-year-old woman had been assaulted by another woman,’ the force said in a statement issued to Mail Online.
‘She was taken to hospital where her injuries were assessed as not life threatening.’
The Metropolitan Police have said that enquiries are ongoing into the circumstances and there have no been any arrests.
Anyone with information is asked to call 101 quoting CAD 7131/28Aug.