LORAIN — The woman said she did what any mother would if they ran across a small child, alone and crying, in the middle of a store.She tried to comfort him.

But what happened as a result stunned her — an enraged man approached the boy and slapped him, and then the man started lobbing curses and threats her way when she tried to intervene on the boy’s behalf.

“I’ve never seen anybody so outraged by somebody crying,” said the woman, 45, who declined to be identified. “I told the man, ‘You don’t deserve to be a parent if you treat a child like that.’ ”

The woman’s 15-year-old son then jumped in to defend his mother, and the man sucker-punched him in the mouth, she told police. The blow was so severe that the teen needed two stitches to close the cut on his lip, she said.

“I don’t even think my son got all his words out before he had blood gushing down his face,” the woman said. “I don’t know if (the man) was on crack or what, but his eyes were very shallow and very cold.”

On Thursday, police released images of the man captured by a security camera inside the A.J. Wright clothing store on Meister Road during the March 2 encounter in hopes that someone can identify him.

The suspect, a Hispanic or light-skinned black male, was with a black woman and three small children, each about a year apart, police Sgt. Mark Carpentiere said.

While police are searching for the man in connection with assault on the woman’s son, they’re also concerned about the welfare of the children he was with, Carpentiere said.

“We’re really concerned about these kids,” Carpentiere said. “The way this guy acted was alarming.”

The woman said she can’t get the incident out of her mind.

“I never expected to walk into a store and have something like that happen,” she said. “I hope the cops get him for the sake of those kids and my son, too.”

Contact Stephen Szucs at 329-7129 or sszucs@chroniclet.com.

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