A brutal, hammer-wielding attacker accused of viciously beating a 57-year-old girl as she entered a Queens subway station and fracturing her cranium was convicted on a number of fees for the disturbing 2022 incident, the district lawyer mentioned.
William Blount was discovered responsible of first-degree assault, theft and different fees following a six-week trial, Queens DA Melinda Katz mentioned Thursday. He was accountable for kicking the sufferer, Nina Rothschild, down the steps of the Queens Plaza subway station in Lengthy Island Metropolis and bludgeoning her over the pinnacle with a hammer in a violent theft.
“This defendant repeatedly bashed an innocent straphanger in the head with a hammer. The victim – who was simply trying to use the subway as millions of New Yorkers do every day – suffered multiple skull fractures,” mentioned Katz.
The grotesque assault on Feb. 24, 2022, that left Rothschild hospitalized with essential accidents was captured on surveillance video. She was seen strolling down the steps as Blount, who was strolling with a black cane, approached her from behind, prosecutors mentioned.
“I kept yelling stop, stop, stop, which of course was completely and utterly useless,” Rothschild said in an exclusive interview with NBC New York a month after the attack. “I began calling ‘Assist, assist, assist, assist!’ And happily two NYPD officers who have been I believe on the decrease platform down by the trains got here up.”
He kicked her down the steps and hit her within the head greater than a dozen occasions with a hammer earlier than taking off. Blount, 60, took her purse, which had some money, two telephones, two rings and credit score and debit playing cards.
Rothschild, a researcher with New York Metropolis’s well being division, was taken to the hospital the place she was handled for a number of cranium fractures. She had a bilateral craniectomy to restore her cranium with titanium mesh, prosecutors mentioned.
“Fortunately or unfortunately, I remember basically the entire thing from start to finish,” Rothschild informed NBC New York. “I bear in mind beginning to go down the subway steps and feeling this blow to my head, which I initially thought was a baseball bat.”
She survived a savage subway assault, now Nina Rothschild is telling her story for the primary time, completely to NBC New York’s Melissa Russo. Hear her outstanding story of survival and restoration from the assault that left her close to demise.
Blount was arrested three days after the assault. A hammer, cane and Rothschild’s tote bag have been discovered when a search warrant was executed at a house on William Road in Manhattan that belonged to a relative of Blount, which was additionally his final identified residence.
Lawyer info for Blount was not instantly accessible. He faces as much as 25 years to life in jail at sentencing, scheduled for Could 7.
Blount beforehand had a prolonged prison document, together with a jail escape try that left him with two damaged ankles, legislation enforcement officers mentioned. His document contains kidnappings, robberies and drug crimes in New York Metropolis and South Carolina relationship to the early Eighties.
He was sentenced to twenty years for kidnapping, 15 years for housebreaking and 5 years (to run concurrently) for committing against the law of violence with a firearm in a case during which he and his brother broke right into a Bojangles in South Carolina in 2000 and kidnapped two staff, making one open the protected.
Blount tried to flee whereas serving that sentence, South Carolina police say. It occurred throughout the homicide of a guard by different inmates amid a bigger escape plot on Sept. 17, 2000. Blount tried to affix the jailbreak, leaping from the jail roof and breaking each his ankles within the course of. He was caught, and acquired hit with a conspiracy to flee cost on prime of the opposite crimes for which he was jailed.
NBC New York’s Melissa Russo, Jonathan Dienst and Courtney Copenhagen contributed to this report.
