It was probably only a matter of time until Nathan Washington exploded, but that can’t excuse the 14-year-old boy’s shocking attacks on three Upper East Side women, a Manhattan judge said yesterday, sentencing him to 5 to 10 years in prison.
Washington’s lawyer, Elfie Chandler, pleaded with Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Michael Corriero to give her client the minimum sentence allowed by law, one year, for the chilling December 2003 attacks.
During a 24-hour span, the hulking boy armed with a real-looking toy gun robbed and sodomized one woman in the vestibule of her building, pulled a gun on another woman and robbed and beat another.
Chandler said Washington deserved mercy because his entire life has been an awful punishment.
His grandmother had forced his mother into prostitution at age 16 to support her other kids – and her heroin habit. The mom became a crack and heroin addict, and gave birth to Nathan.
By age 3, he was watching his mother’s boyfriend repeatedly beat and rape her. A year later, he was in foster care, where he was acting out sexually, repeating the awful things he’d seen in his home.
Prosecutor Coleen Balbert read a statement from another of Washington’s victims, who said he had “ruined her life,” savagely kicking in her in the head and fracturing her skull after she’d already given him her money. A witness had seen him smiling as he walked away from the attack.
Corriero agreed with Chandler that the boy had been doomed by his childhood. “It’s almost as if an appointment was made for him today on the day of his birth,” he said.
And he agreed with Balbert on the sentence, because “his victims would take any lesser sentence as a further victimization.”