NYC landlord and Harvard fellow defends pummeling armed vagrant who charged him with ‘deadly weapon’: ‘Scared for my life’

A Chinatown landlord and Harvard fellow told The Post on Tuesday he was defending himself when he pummeled an armed homeless man — and provided chilling new video of the encounter.

“I just wanted to get home to my wife and kids,’’ Brian Chin, 32, said he remembered thinking as the madman began wildly swinging a nail-studded piece of wood at him.

Chin — a graduate psychology student and teaching fellow in the Ivy League school’s Division of Continuing Education — said the terrifying showdown began after he spotted the vagrant on the ground outside the subway station at Chrystie and Grand streets in Manhattan around 8:30 p.m. Saturday.

The married dad — who locals told The Post is a makeshift activist dedicated to cleaning up the junkie-strewn area — said he put on black rubber gloves as he approached the man, as he always does when he checks on the homeless.

“I don’t bend over because we see so much here, people in the park that use K2, and the moment that you wake them up or anything, the situation can turn violent,’’ said Chin — who publicly decried crime in the neighborhood after a vagrant murdered one of his tenants in 2022.

Chin said he asked the guy if he was OK.

“I recognized him because he was a panhandler that has been frequently hanging out on Grand Street. He has never been violent to me,’’ the landlord said.

“I ask him, ‘Are you OK, man? Do I have to call the cops? Do I have to call the ambulance?’ Nothing,’’ Chin said.

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The landlord then appeared to kick the man, video shows.

Chin said he “tapped” the man on the butt to see if he had OD’d and needed medical attention.

“We have so many drug overdoses and deaths and pretty much every conceivable horror that you can imagine,’’ he said. “Immediately he woke up after that and just started screaming.

“I was like, ‘Whoa, dude, dude, don’t let me call the cops.’ Something about the word ‘cops’ just triggered him.

“He picked up a metal folding chair and started smashing everything around him.”

Chin said he briefly left to go to his nearby office to use the bathroom, then returned — because the horrific slaying of his renter Christina Yuna Lee two years ago still haunts him.

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“Especially after the murder, if someone is acting violent, I just like to stand by the front door, just to make sure that no one gets followed in, all my tenants are safe,’’ Chin said.

He said he vagrant “had come back to the scene looking for me,” this time armed with a weapon — a wooden “thick club with nails spike through it.

“That’s when he pulled the club from his back, raised it above his head and started charging at me,’’ Chin said.

“As he is swinging towards me, I back up, and I just dodge and try to step out of the way,’’ Chin said. “At this point, I’m just scared for my life.

“If I had not moved out of the way these multiple times, quite possibly I would be dead.”

The man then paused, and Chin said he saw his chance to get the club away from him.

“I charge at him. I do not hit him. I attempt to grab the weapon with both hands … and we start to fall down onto the ground,’’ Chin said.

“I try to keep wrestling the weapon away from him with my left hand, and I strike with my right hand for a period of two seconds,” he said.

Footage shows the man on the ground as Chin rains six punches on his head.

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The landlord then gets up with the club, backs off and tells people to call cops, he said.

The vagrant was hospitalized with wounds bad enough that he was unable to tell cops his name, police sources have said. He had no ID on him at the time.

When he is identified, he will be charged with menacing, a source has said.

Chin said he left the man with a bloody nose — and that the guy’s more severe “8- or 9-inch’’ head wound was from when he stumbled after cops arrived, grabbed onto an unsteady newsstand box in front of him and fell backward onto the pavement.

“I feel awful. I never want anyone to get hurt,’’ said Chin — a former Army reservist “with a specialization in Psychological Operations,” according to his LinkedIn page .

Chin believes he was wrongfully charged by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office. He said “multiple witnesses’’ backed up his claim that the homeless man “was the aggressor and I was defending myself from a deadly weapon.’’

While he feared he would be killed during Saturday’s confrontation, Chin said, “I’m now even more scared for my life —  I’m looking at seven years’’ behind bars over his felony assault rap.

“Why is my life being upended, my teaching career destroyed?’’ he said. “People think I’m just a landlord, you know, but my passion, my real job is, you know, I’m a teaching fellow at Harvard University for the last six years.

“Why is this happening to me when I was only defending my life from a man who unprovokedly attacked me with a deadly weapon?’’

— Additional reporting by Kyle Schnitzer

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