A deranged man bashed a 34-year-old Grammy-nominated musician’s face with a hammer during a bloody attack in Brooklyn, police said Wednesday.
Jamaica native Andrew “Dru” Barnes of the alternative reggaeton band JOGYO, which has performed at Lincoln Center, may lose his left eye, according to friends.
“To be honest, having been hit in the head with a hammer, it’s a miracle Dru is alive, and even more so that there’s no brain damage at all,” Barnes’ friend Gerrit Vooren wrote on a Facebook page entitled “Dru Barns Healing Page.”
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Barnes was leaving a friend’s home when he got lost and the stranger assaulted him.
“Dru is going to loose his left eye. The damage was too severe to repair it. Too many parts of his eye were severed.”
Barnes had just left Vooren’s home in Bedford-Stuyvesant at about 11 a.m. last Thursday and was on his way to Fort Greene when he got lost, friends said.
He ended up on Jefferson Ave. near Howard Ave. where police said the unidentified assailant jumped him and repeatedly struck him with the hammer.
Dru Barnes before he was attacked by a hammer-wielding maniac in Brooklyn.
It’s believed that the assailant trailed him for about a block before attacking, sources said.
“Dru yelled out, the man ran, and the ambulance and police appeared quickly and took him to Kings County Medical Center,” Vooren wrote.
“I got a call from the police department that Dru was in the trauma unit and asked for me.”
This is the street in Bedford-Stuyvesant was where Barnes was attacked.
Vooren believes Barnes was the victim of a hate crime, even though the attacker didn’t say anything derogatory.
“He just came out of nowhere and ran,” Vooren wrote. “He did leave the hammer behind, so we hope there’s fingerprints/DNA on it.”
Barnes’ attacker was still at large Wednesday.
Anyone with information regarding the attack is urged to contact authorities. Calls to Crime Stoppers at (800) 577-TIPS are confidential.
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