Man charged in glass bottle attack on Jewish students in Pittsburgh now accused in earlier attack

PITTSBURGH (AP) — A man accused of having assaulted two Jewish students with a glass bottle on the campus of the University of Pittsburgh is now accused of having thrown a bottle at two people associated with another university the day before.

Jarrett Buba, 52, was charged earlier with felony aggravated assault in the Aug. 30 attack on the students who were walking near Pitt’s Cathedral of Learning.

A day earlier, two people associated with Carnegie Mellon University told university police that a man threw a glass bottle at them in the Oakland neighborhood. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette reports that a police complaint did not say why the two individuals were targeted. The bottle hit a vehicle and neither person was injured, officials said.

Buba is also charged with simple assault, reckless endangerment, resisting arrest and harassment in the alleged University of Pittsburgh attack. Prosecutors allege that he was sitting at a table across the street from the students and then ran across the street and hit them from behind with the bottle.

The students, who were wearing traditional Jewish yarmulke head coverings, were treated at the scene, university police said. One had cuts on his face and the other was bleeding from cuts on his neck, which police said may have been inflicted when the bottle broke.

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Buba, who police said has no known affiliation with the school, was wearing a kaffiyeh, a traditional checkered scarf worn in the Middle East and increasingly displayed as a symbol of solidarity with the Palestinian people.

The university called it an “appalling incident” and said leaders were in contact with the Hillel University Center as well as the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. Agents from the FBI’s Pittsburgh field office were also sent to the scene to investigate the possibility of a hate crime, police said.

Carnegie Mellon officers obtained Buba’s arrest photo and were able to identify him as the man in the Aug. 29 video footage, after which charges including attempted aggravated assault, reckless endangerment and harassment were filed Thursday, authorities said in a criminal complaint.

Court documents don’t list an attorney for the suspect in either case, and a listed number for him couldn’t be found.

The University of Pittsburgh incident came at the end of the first full week of fall semester classes and a few months after spring protests on the campus over the war in Gaza, one of which took place in front of the Cathedral of Learning.