Man charged in random assault on tourist visiting Vancouver

A woman visiting from Ontario says she was left with black eyes and a broken nose after a shocking attack by a stranger downtown.

A man in his 30s has been charged with assault causing bodily harm after allegedly attacking a tourist at random in Vancouver’s upscale Coal Harbour neighbourhood.

The incident occurred around 12:30 a.m. on April 15, according to a brief email from the Vancouver Police Department.

The victim’s TikTok posts about the incident have received hundreds of thousands of views and provide her account of what happened.

User @supitssteph says in the first video in the series that the assault happened at the end of her first full day in Vancouver. She had taken the four-day sleeper train to the city from Toronto, where she lives.

After more than an hour walking in Stanley Park after dinner that evening, she says she was walking along the seawall in Coal Harbour on the way back to her hotel.

She says a man said something to her that she didn’t understand, and when she turned to face him he started running at her.

The attack was totally unprovoked, according to the video.

“It just felt like he was a predator and I was prey,” the victim says.

She goes on to describe running from her attacker, who caught up to her and threw her to the ground.

After she managed to escape and run away, she called 911, only to find that her assailant was still following her. She says he grabbed her phone and smashed it, and continued pursuing her after she fought him off a second, third and fourth time.

The attack finally ended when the woman ran into a group of plainclothes police officers, who apprehended the assailant.

Warning: The video below contains some profanity.

Peterhans Jalo Nungu has been charged with assault causing bodily harm, according to the VPD.

Online court records show the accused was born in 1991 and was scheduled to appear in court in Vancouver Wednesday morning. He had been in custody since the attack, but was granted a release order at his Wednesday appearance. He is next due in court on May 20.

At the Vancouver Police Board meeting on Thursday, Chief Const. Adam Palmer commented on Nungu’s release, telling board members the accused is undergoing “a psych assessment of some sort” and has conditions that amount to “house arrest.”

“So, they are in hospital right now being reviewed, but we do have some concerns – not about them getting assessed, but (about) the fact that that person may be back out in (the) community," Palmer said.

“Stay tuned to see what further information will be coming forward if that continues to be the case and that person is not held on some sort of a psych hold. But criminally, they have been released, which is concerning.”

Nungu also appears to be the accused in an unrelated case in Surrey provincial court.

An accused with the same name and birth year is charged with uttering threats, uttering threats to burn, destroy or damage, and assaulting a peace officer in that case. The file is marked as a “K” file, a designation courts use to indicate cases of alleged intimate partner violence.

Those alleged offences took place on April 13 in the City of Surrey, according to court records, which show he was released from custody after appearing before a judge on the afternoon of April 14, less than 12 hours before the Coal Harbour attack.