Three men attacked and tried to rob a University of Minnesota student early Saturday morning in the Marcy-Holmes neighborhood, according to a Minneapolis police report.

The 21-year-old victim was outside Maxwell’s Café and Grill at Eighth Avenue and Fourth Street Southeast at about 4 a.m. when three men approached her from behind and attempted to rob her, the report said.

One of the men punched her from behind and began choking her on the ground, but Adel Dayem Hamid, the owner of Maxwell’s, chased the men off with a baseball bat, he said.

“I saw the three guys behind her, so I felt like something was going on; something was going to happen,” Hamid said.

When he saw the men attack the victim, Hamid said he called one of his friends from inside Maxwell’s, and both charged after the men but didn’t catch any of them.

Hamid said he stopped chasing the men to see if the victim was OK.

“She was very scared, but when she saw me she knew she was OK because everybody knows me and calls me Maxwell here because of my business,” he said.

The victim did not sustain any serious injuries, the report said.

Police arrived shortly afterward, and Hamid said the victim arrived at her friend’s apartment safely.

Twenty-one car thefts reported since Jan. 1

There have been 21 vehicle thefts in Minneapolis’ 2nd precinct since the start of 2013 — the most in the past five years.

Police released a neighborhood crime advisory for the precinct Thursday.

Of the 21 thefts, seven were stolen using keys that were already inside the cars or were taken during a robbery or burglary, according to the advisory.

There were only nine car thefts throughout the first three weeks of January last year, precinct Crime Prevention Specialist Nick Juarez said.

Police haven’t seen numbers like these since 2010, when 20 car thefts occurred in the same time span, Juarez said.

“We’re looking at 2010, at the beginning of the year, when we had all those auto thefts and seeing if we can tie those thefts into what we’re experiencing today,” Juarez said.

The police have no suspects in any of the car thefts.