A white Westchester County man was sentenced Tuesday to 15 years in state prison for the random beating and stabbing of a black teenage girl in 2020.
Robert McCallion, 36, admitted to attacking the 17-year-old with a knife at an apartment complex in Ossining on March 13, 2020 – in a brutal confrontation in which he also tried to gouge her eyes out with his thumbs, slammed her head into the concrete multiple times and flung “racial epithets and anti-Semitic slurs,” the county DA said.
The two hadn’t known each other prior to the attack at the Avalon Apartments, where McCallion lived and where the girl had been visiting family.
The girl had multiple stab wounds to the face, back, hands and chest — and she suffered a collapsed lung, kidney and eyelid lacerations, and corneal abrasions in both eyes, the DA office said in an announcement.
The victim and her mother didn’t attend McCallion’s sentencing in White Plains, with the teen’s mother saying in a note presented by prosecutors that she couldn’t stand to be in the attacker’s presence, lohud.com reported.
“You made a conscious decision to harm her just because of the color of her skin,” the mom said in the letter.
McCallion apologized, saying he’d been mentally unstable and off his meds on the day of the attack but added he “had no hate” in his heart, the publication stated.
When police arrived on the scene on the day of the attack, they had found him covered in blood while the victim hid in the building after her father intervened to try to stop McCallion, according to the DA.
Cops searched his apartment and found Nazi and other “white nationalist” paraphernalia as well as multiple weapons, DA Mimi Rocah said. Two days after the assault, he broke a Westchester County Jail nurse’s nose while he was locked up in Valhalla.
“Horrific hate crimes like this are not only acts of violence against an individual, they are crimes against entire communities,” Rocah said in a statement. “Our hearts go out to this young woman who suffered unimaginable pain and trauma, and we have been determined to secure for her the justice she is due.”
In addition to his 15-year sentence, McCallion will undergo five years supervised release on 14 felony charges, including second-degree attempted murder as a hate crime.
