What to KnowThe ugly assault on Feb. 24, 2022, that left Nina Rothschild hospitalized with important accidents was captured on surveillance video; William Blount was arrested three days later. His lawyer argued prosecutors had the incorrect man.In April, a jury convicted Blount of first-degree assault, theft and different costs. Rothschild suffered a number of cranium fractures and remembered each second of the assault, she advised Information 4 a month later. It was a criminal offense that terrified town for its brutality and obvious randomness.Blount had a prolonged felony file, together with a jail escape try that left him with two damaged ankles, regulation enforcement officers mentioned. His file contains kidnappings, robberies and drug crimes in New York Metropolis and South Carolina relationship to the early Eighties.
The person convicted of viciously beating a 57-year-old girl with a hammer as she entered a Queens subway station, fracturing her cranium as he bludgeoned her greater than a dozen occasions in a violent 2022 theft, is scheduled to be sentenced on Thursday. And his sufferer, nonetheless recovering, is anticipated to be in courtroom.
William Blount was discovered responsible in April of first-degree assault, theft and different costs within the Feb. 24, 2022 assault on Nina Rothschild. Jurors mentioned he was accountable for kicking Rothschild down the steps of the Queens Plaza subway station in Lengthy Island Metropolis, bashing her within the head repeatedly and stealing her belongings.
His lawyer had argued that prosecutors had the incorrect man.
The ugly assault on Feb. 24, 2022, that left Rothschild hospitalized with important 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.
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 spoke with NBC New York completely a few month after the assault and is anticipated to ship a sufferer influence assertion at Blount’s sentencing Thursday.
“I kept yelling stop, stop, stop, which of course was completely and utterly useless,” she recalled of the 2022 encounter. “I saved calling ‘Assist, assist, assist, assist!’ And thankfully two NYPD officers who had been, I believe, on the decrease platform down by the trains got here up.”
Then a researcher with New York Metropolis’s well being division, Rothschild was handled on the hospital 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 advised 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 exceptional 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 had been discovered when a search warrant was executed at a house in Manhattan that belonged to a relative of Blount, which was additionally his final recognized residence.
Blount had a prolonged felony file, together with a jail escape try that left him with two damaged ankles, regulation enforcement officers mentioned. His file 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 a criminal offense 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 workers, making one open the secure.
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 received 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.
