Man Accused of Killing 8 People in 2017 New York Attack Found Guilty – NBC Los Angeles

NEW YORK — Jurors have reached a guilty verdict in the federal death penalty case of a 34-year-old man who killed eight people on a Manhattan bike path five years ago in an attempt, prosecutors said, to impress a terrorist group.

Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbek national living in New Jersey at the time of the 2017 Halloween attack, drove a Home Depot rental van at least 10 blocks along the popular Hudson River Greenway bike path from West Houston to Chambers Streets, running over nearly a dozen pedestrians and bicyclists before crashing into a school bus.

The vehicle attack killed a woman visiting Belgium with her family, five friends from Argentina and two Americans. She left others with permanent injuries, including a woman who lost her legs.

The dozen jurors deliberated for about seven hours over two days before sentencing Saipov Thursday on 28 counts of crimes including murder in aid of organized crime and support of a foreign terrorist organization. Jurors will return to court no earlier than February 6 to hear more evidence to help decide whether he should be executed or spend the rest of his life in prison.

The Islamic extremist bowed his head as he heard the verdict in a Manhattan courthouse a few blocks from where the attack ended.

A death sentence for Saipov would be an extreme rarity in New York. The state no longer applies capital punishment, and the last state execution was in 1963. A federal jury in New York has not handed down a death sentence that has withstood legal appeals in decades, with the last execution in 1954.

Witnesses at the time of the terror attack, the deadliest of its kind in New York City since 9/11, said the school bus crash also appeared deliberate. About a dozen were injured, some of them seriously, in addition to the eight deaths in what the authorities described as a “cowardly act of terrorism.”

Saipov reportedly showed no remorse. Prosecutors told jurors in closing arguments that later, the day after the attack, he said he was proud of what he did and smiled when he spoke to an FBI agent.

He got out of his truck yelling “God is great” in Arabic, with pellet guns and paintballs in his hands before a police officer shot him because he thought they were real firearms.

He also asked to hang the flag of the Islamic State group in his Manhattan hospital room, prosecutors previously said.

Even before the trial, there was no doubt that Saipov was a murderer. Saipov’s defense attorney, David Patton, did not deny that his client killed eight people and seriously injured others in the attack on the shadow of the World Trade Center.

“It was not an accident. He did it intentionally,” Patton said. “At the end of the day, there is no point in such a senseless act.”

During the trial, Patton told the jury that Saipov’s actions were “senseless, horrible, and there is no justification for them.”

However, the lawyer said prosecutors were wrong to say Saipov did it to curry favor with a terrorist group, saying the brutality shows he already considered himself a member. Patton said Saipov expected to die a martyr’s death that day.

The defense did not comment outside of court after the verdict.

Nathan David Chacon, 45, is accused of knowingly driving his silver 2007 Chevrolet Silverado into a police department lobby.

The defense asked the jury to acquit Saipov of the extortion charges, saying he intended to die a martyrdom and was not colluding with the Islamic State organization, despite voluminous amounts of the group’s propaganda found on his electronic devices. and in his house.

Saipov legally moved to the US from Uzbekistan in 2010 and lived in Ohio and Florida before joining his family in Paterson, New Jersey. He did not testify at his trial, instead sitting silently every day, unlike a 2019 pre-trial hearing where he insisted on asking the judge why he should be tried for eight deaths when “thousands and thousands of Muslims are dying.” Worldwide. .”

Among those who testified were several relatives from Belgium who were injured in the attack. Aristide Melissas, a father, said he had challenged family members to bike rides to the World Trade Center, with the loser paying for the ice cream. When he was hit by Saipov’s truck, his skull was fractured. He underwent brain surgery.

His wife, Marion Van Reeth, spoke of waking up in a hospital to find that her legs had been amputated.

Saipov marks the first death penalty case under the Biden administration. Saipov’s lawyers have said the death penalty process was irreparably tainted by former President Donald Trump, who tweeted a day after the attack that Saipov “SHOULD GET THE DEATH PENALTY!” — leading Biden to later institute a moratorium on executions for federal crimes.

Until Saipov’s trial, Biden’s Justice Department, under the direction of Attorney General Merrick Garland, had not launched any new attempts to obtain the death penalty in a federal case. But Garland has allowed US prosecutors to continue advocating capital punishment in cases handed down from previous administrations.

It’s been a decade since a jury in New York last considered the death penalty.

Federal juries in Brooklyn twice sentenced a man who murdered two NYPD detectives to death, once in 2007 and again in 2013, but both sentences were overturned on appeal. A judge eventually ruled that the killer had an intellectual disability.

In 2001, just weeks before the 9/11 attacks, federal juries in Manhattan refused to impose the death penalty on two men convicted of the deadly bombings of two US embassies in Africa. Lawyers for the men had urged jurors not to make martyrs of the defendants.