A 35-year-old Surfside man is facing hate crime and battery charges after police say he approached a Jewish couple on an electric scooter, hurled antisemitic slurs, punched the husband in the head, and threatened to kill him as he tried to walk away. Jorden Stephen Perozo was arrested without incident three days later at his own workplace, a bar just blocks from where the confrontation allegedly unfolded.
According to WSVN 7News, the incident began on the 9500 block of Harding Avenue, where the victim and his wife were walking on August 16 when Perozo allegedly approached them on an electric scooter and directed profanity at the couple and the Jewish community. Investigators said Perozo then punched the victim on the side of the head with a closed fist and threatened to kill him as the man tried to walk away. The victim's wife recorded the confrontation on her cellphone, according to the arrest report cited by the station, and Perozo reportedly kept yelling profanities and making derogatory remarks even after the physical assault.
Police located Perozo on Wednesday at his workplace, Flanigan's Bar & Grill on Harding Avenue, and took him into custody without incident. He was charged with battery with prejudice and harassment or intimidation based on religious or ethnic heritage. A judge found probable cause in the case and set Perozo's bond at $6,000.
How Florida's Hate Crime Law Escalates the Charge
The battery charge against Perozo would ordinarily be a first-degree misdemeanor carrying up to a year in jail. But under Florida Statute § 775.085, any misdemeanor or felony committed with evidence of religious prejudice is bumped up to the next higher degree — transforming the charge into a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison, according to Online Sunshine, the state's official statutes portal.
Public social media postings reviewed as part of this report show Perozo, identified as a 35-year-old Surfside resident, was active in online alternative music communities and listed his workplace as Flanigan's, where officers ultimately found him.
Part of a Wider Pattern in Coastal Miami-Dade
The Harding Avenue arrest lands amid a documented run of antisemitic incidents across South Florida's coastal Jewish communities. Just weeks earlier, on August 3, police arrested a woman in North Miami Beach after she allegedly shouted “I hate them” and struck a Jewish man wearing a yarmulke inside a Target Starbucks before advancing on him with a metal chair, as Hoodline previously reported. In December 2025, Miami Beach police arrested a 33-year-old man for a hate-crime robbery after he allegedly hurled an antisemitic slur at a Jewish day school teacher near Lehrman Community Day School, slapped her, and spat in her face, according to CBS News.
Synagogues have not been spared either. In October 2025, Miami Beach police arrested a man who allegedly returned to a Normandy Isle synagogue on Yom Kippur to harass congregants — while he was already out on bond for committing the same offense at the same temple weeks earlier, an incident just south of the Surfside town line. And Surfside itself has a documented history of street-level harassment against its Orthodox residents: in April 2024, Hoodline reported that soda cans and water cups were being thrown from passing vehicles at Orthodox Jewish pedestrians in an earlier wave of incidents that prompted calls for stepped-up police patrols.
Why It Hits Hard in Surfside
The alleged attack carries particular weight in Surfside, a town of roughly 5,600 residents where approximately one-third to nearly half are Jewish, and where Orthodox Jews make up about 34% of the local Jewish population in the 33154 zip code — nearly four times the national average, according to The Washington Post. The town's dense network of walkable synagogues and designated eruv boundaries makes street-level harassment especially visible to residents who rely on those routes daily.
Statewide data suggest the problem is bigger than any single arrest report can capture. A report released by Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody in December 2024 found that reported hate crimes rose 36% in 2023 to 311 incidents statewide, with incidents targeting Jewish Floridians nearly doubling from the year before, according to the Office of the Florida Attorney General. Yet only 58 of Florida's 254 law enforcement agencies submitted hate crime data in 2022, meaning official statistics likely undercount the true scope of the problem — a gap that prompted a $1 million federal grant to establish a specialized Florida Hate Crimes Task Force in October 2024.
Nationally, the trend is more complicated. The Anti-Defamation League's annual audit, released in May, found that overall antisemitic incidents nationwide dropped 33% in 2025 to 6,274, even as physical assaults against Jewish individuals reached a record high of 203 incidents, according to the Associated Press. Perozo's alleged assault on Harding Avenue fits squarely into that more violent, if less frequent, category. What remains unknown is Perozo's motive and whether he has any prior criminal record, and it is not yet clear how Surfside police or local community security groups plan to adjust patrols along the Harding Avenue corridor in response.
