The NYPD has identified the suspect involved in an assault on a gay couple in the Dallas BBQ restaurant in Chelsea as career criminal  Bayna El-Amin, El-Amin has 18 prior arrests spanning back to 1993, police said. All but two of those incidents took place out of state.

ABC 7 reports:

Detectives have been tracking him for about a week, but have not been able to take him into custody. They will put out his picture later Tuesday.

“I have him identified, we are seeking him now. He’s been identified for about a week. We will see if we can get him in,” said NYPD Chief of Detectives Robert Boyce. “He is a career criminal. We believe he has fled the state.”

Bayna El-Amin’s Facebook page appears to have been deleted, but Google’s cache for the page shows that he says he works in “Personal Security for Sketchie ENTertainment,” a nightclub promotion company.

Directly after the horrible incident blogger Waddie G of The G-List attempted to use this incident to drive a wedge into the LGBT community by falsely claiming “white privilege” and declaring that the attacker himself was actually gay and was a victim of harassment by the couple that was bashed.

 One of the patrons at the restaurant called me and identified the chair thrower by name.  I looked up the chair tosser’s Facebook profile, and he is allegedly gay, gay, gay and pretty popular in the ballroom scene.  I am not going to snitch the guy out because I am on his side of self-defenseminus the chair tossing and hate the white gay privileged narratives by gay bloggers, blogs and organizations who sensationalized this incident into more than what it was to protect the white gay hot head who wanted to demonize the Black gay men as aggressors over a physical altercation that he provoked when he could have ignored their foul language like I always do when insults are hurled my way.

Police released surveillance video of the suspect on May 7, one day after disturbing video emerged of a brawl inside the restaurant during which Jonathan Snipes was cracked over the head with a wooden chair.