A 72-year-old cancer survivor was left with bleeding on the brain when he was knocked out in broad daylight on a West Village street, law enforcement sources and the victim said on Tuesday.
Retired cabbie Donald Lathrom was listening to his iPod while walking to his home from a local deli around 5:30 p.m. when a punk standing on the sidewalk near the corner of Jane Street near West Street smashed him in the face.
The sickening attack was caught on surveillance video, which shows a stunned Lathrom tumbling into a doorway and hitting the sidewalk before the suspect bolts across the street, where a friend was waiting, cops said.
Lathrom, who is in remission from lung cancer, was rushed to Beth Israel Hospital with bleeding on the brain and was listed in stable condition.
In an interview from his hospital bed Lathrom told The Post he doesn’t really remember the attack, which left him “stunned” and “confused.”
“I just remembered saying ‘What happened?’” he recalled saying when a doorman rushed to his aide.
“I didn’t even know that I had been punched until he explained it to me.”
Lathrom said he was on his way back to his home at the Jane Street Hotel after buying beer at a convenience store and was looking forward to a relaxing evening when one of the suspects sucker punched him.
“But that (relaxing evening) didn’t happen,” he said. “Basically I just walked by somebody, and he wound up punching me hard. I didn’t see him coming.”
After the incident, Lathrom told police that he had seen the suspects, believed to be in their early 20s, after leaving the deli at West 12th Street and Eighth Avenue a few minutes before the assault — leading investigators to believe the men intentionally targeted him.
Lathrom said he believes he was the latest victim of the “knockout” game — where one assailant tries to lay out a target with one punch while another shoots video and posts it online.
“That’s what I think it is,” he said. “If it was a robbery, he’d have gone through my pockets or attempted to take something. I had an iPad and a kindle reader. There was no attempt to take anything.”
“Once he got me down on the ground, he was happy to leave.”
No arrests have been made.
Additional reporting by Elizabeth Hagen and Daniel Prendergast