Updated at 6:45 p.m. June 21, 2015
A 43-year-old man’s thumb was severed early Sunday morning when one of four suspects who tried to steal the victim’s bicycle drew a two-foot machete and starting hacking when the man refused to surrender the bike.
The victim was walking his bicycle at 12th Street and Burlington Avenue about 12:30 a.m. when the suspects, all males in their late teens to mid-20s, approached and tried to steal the bike, Sgt. John Marroquin of the Los Angeles Police Department‘s Rampart Station said.
The man put up a struggle, refusing to relinquish the bicycle, prompting one of the suspects to hack him in the head, face, arms and hands with an approximately 24-inch machete, the sergeant said.
The man’s left thumb was severed in the attack and he also suffered lacerations to the left side of his face, cuts to the back of his head, lacerations to both hands and his right arm, Marroquin said.
The suspects fled the scene without the bike and were last seen in a green late 1980s-model Honda or Toyota sedan, he said.
The thumb was collected and brought to a hospital where the man was being treated, but it was unclear if it had been successfully reattached, Marroquin said.
The man was hospitalized in critical but stable condition, Marroquin said.
— City News Service