The mother of a woman arrested for critically injuring an 85-year-old great-grandmother in an unprovoked shove near Union Square Park in Manhattan says her daughter has bipolar disorder and stopped taking her medication before the assault.
Paris Valentine, 29, is being held without bail on a felony assault charge for allegedly pushing the elderly victim face-first onto the sidewalk Monday. At her arraignment the next day, a lawyer for Valentine, Rosa Isabel Valiente, requested unspecified medical attention for her client but did not mention mental illness.
“She was getting some treatment for being bipolar. She was on medication but she’s not on it anymore,” the suspect’s mother, Loretta Valentine, told the Daily News. “I just don’t know why she did this. She’s a good person with a kind heart. I really just don’t know what happened.”
Mental illness has played a role in an array of unprovoked attacks across NYC, including a recent string of assaults on elderly victims by strangers. A 76-year-old retired kindergarten teacher who died after being shoved down a Chelsea subway staircase with no warning from behind is among the examples. In that case, the accused had undergone a psychiatric evaluation at Bellevue Hospital earlier in the day before being released.
In the most recent episode, the victim was stepping off an MTA bus near her home when she was violently shoved to the ground, cops said. The victim fractured her skull on the sidewalk in the attack and is currently in a medically induced coma at Bellevue Hospital. She may never recover, her family said.
“It’s just so heartbreaking,” the victim’s 68-year-old daughter said. “She is an incredible woman who loved the city and this is what the city gave back to her.”
Valentine’s mother claimed her daughter, a full-time student studying psychology at CUNY, only shoved the elderly woman after the victim elbowed her. “She had her book and was studying,” Loretta said of her daughter. “She was in the park.”
There is no mention of any interaction between the two in the NYPD’s account nor was it raised in court during Valentine’s arraignment. Valentine’s lawyer told the judge Valentine is a hard-working student from a good family who “feels really terrible” about the attack. Prosecutors say she never said a word or looked back after the shove.
Prior to the assault, Valentine had been arrested at least three times for a string of clashes with residents at a Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, apartment building where she lived until she was evicted for not paying rent last December, police sources said.
The three arrests were ultimately dismissed and sealed, the sources said.
In 2023, Valentine was arrested for striking a neighbor with a cane inside the building and then violating an order of protection barring her from being near that neighbor, according to police sources. The victim in that attack told The News that Valentine insulted her as they passed each other in the elevator and then struck her when the victim talked back.
“It was just ranting,” said the assault victim, who gave her name as Erica. “Crazy talk, ranting nonsense.”
But Erica said she was surprised Valentine never got any help despite numerous complaints and visits from the NYPD.
“You would think with the amount of times we called the cops, someone could have helped her,” she added.
“We would have meetings together in the neighborhood to try and brainstorm, see who has some kind of solution, if anyone knew a program we can reach out to,” said Erica. “Someone was really trying to reach out to social services but we couldn’t get anyone to help.”
Ring doorbell footage obtained by the Daily News shows NYPD cops knocking on Valentine’s door on three separate occasions, with one officer telling her, “You’re screaming through the walls at your neighbors. Normal people don’t do that. I can’t keep coming back here.”
Valentine belligerently refuses to open her door each time. At one point she can be heard screaming, “If you don’t have a warrant get the f— away from my door!”
During an earlier visit, another officer tells Valentine, “I’m not gonna need a warrant. I didn’t need a warrant last time. We’ll take this door down and drive you straight to the hospital. Your behavior is erratic and a danger to others.”
The most recent arrest was on March 9, 2025, when she was accused of confronting a 28-year-old male neighbor in the building on Hart St. near Marcy Ave. with a Taser in her hand. She turned the Taser on during the confrontation, making her neighbor uneasy, police sources said. Like the others, that charge was eventually dismissed.
Valentine was back to living with her mother in Flatbush prior to Monday’s assault, her lawyer said during the suspect’s arraignment for the Union Square attack. Housing court documents show that she at one point owed more than $83,000 in back rent for the apartment she was evicted from.
The shove victim has two daughters, five grandchildren and at least one great-grandchild, according to the conductor of the Yiddish Philharmonic Chorus, of which she was a member.
“She is at the moment the senior citizen at the chorus, the oldest person at 85,” said conductor Binyumen Schaechter. “She’s beloved by everyone. This year, at 85, was the first year she had a solo coming up.”