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MONSEY, N.Y. (WCBS 880) — The attorney for the suspect in the Hanukkah stabbing attack in Monsey spoke out on Thursday in defense of his client, stressing that mental health played a major role in the attack.
Grafton Thomas’ attorney, Michael Sussman, noted his client was a victim of abuse from a young age and witnessed violence his entire life.
Sussman says Thomas experienced “sexual abuse at an early age,” and was “witness to abuse of his mother and third parties at an early age.” The defense attorney also says there were “attempted interventions by him with regards to that abuse.”
The 37-year-old pleaded not guilty over the weekend to five counts of attempted murder and one count of burglary after he allegedly attacked five people with a machete at a Hanukkah gathering inside a rabbi’s home.
Sussman says describing his client as anti-Semitic is “ignorant” and emphasized that his client grew up in a Jewish community with Jewish friends.
The attorney says rejection has been a reoccurring theme in Thomas’ life, which has greatly impacted his mental health.
He says the most significant incident in Thomas’ life was the “rejection by his natural father in his mid-twenties of a very significant nature – psychiatric hospitalizations in Utah which followed that rejection.”
Meanwhile, the family of a man critically injured in the attack spoke out on Thursday morning to plead for an end to the hate.
Josef Neumann, 72, was among the victims in the stabbing attack and while others have been released, he remains in critical condition in a coma.
The father of seven’s family says his skull was penetrated by the machete and if he ever does wake up from that coma, doctors are afraid he may have permanent brain damage, leaving him paralyzed and speech impaired for the rest of his life. He was also cut three times on the head, once on the neck and his right arm, in the words of his family, "was shattered."
"The doctors do not have high hopes for him... If he wakes up he may never be able to walk, talk or even process speech again," Neumann's daughter, Nicky Kohen, said, adding that the family isn't giving up hope. "As a family we all believe that God has a plan."
Neumann's son, David, said he goes to Rabbi Rottenberg's home every Saturday but his kids had been feeling sick so he wasn't there on the night of the attack.
"I thought to myself that if I was there I would be able to do something and I would definitely try to do something, but I wasn't there," David Neumann said.
Kohen issued an emotional plea to end hatred and anti-Semitism.
"We want our kids to go to school and feel safe, we want to go to our synagogues and feel safe, we want to go to groceries and malls and feel safe," she said. "I'm begging you, please stand up and stop this hatred."
Thomas, 37, is being held at a Westchester correctional facility and faces an additional five federal hate crime charges. If Neumann dies, Thomas could face the death penalty.
In her first public comments since the attack, the suspect's mother, Kim Thomas, tells the New York Post the searches and writings federal investigators found, everything from Nazis to swastikas to searches for nearby temples, weren't anti-Semitism but effects of his mental illness.