A Brooklyn bicyclist wanted for spitting on a Hasidic teen — whose family was victimized in an infamous anti-Semitic murder on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1994 — was arrested Monday and charged with a hate crime.
Nicholas Jones is accused of spitting on the 16-year-old victim while bicycling past him near Eastern Parkway and Albany Ave. in Crown Heights about 5:50 p.m. Oct. 22.
Jones, 40, is charged with aggravated harassment as a hate crime. The teen, dressed in traditional Hasidic garb, was hit on the black hat he was wearing.
After cops released surveillance photos of the suspect last Wednesday and asked the public’s help identifying him, he was recognized by his probation officer as the man in the images, police said. Jones lives in East New York, according to cops.
The suspect was arrested in July for misdemeanor assault in Manhattan and is on probation for a Florida conviction involving assault with a weapon, NYPD officials said.
The spitter sped away after the incident while the teen went home and told his mother what happened. She, in turn, called her mother, Devorah Halberstam, who became an activist after her son, Ari Halberstam, 16, was shot to death in an anti-Semitic terror attack in March 1994 while riding in a van on the Brooklyn Bridge with fellow yeshiva students.
Halberstam, who sits on a civilian panel that helps the NYPD review hate crimes, said Monday she is grateful for the arrest.
“The fact that he spit speaks to the vile nature of what he did and who he is,” she said. “I don’t know if anything he says has any meaning.”
NYPD
Police released this photo of a man who allegedly spat on a Brooklyn boy in a suspected hate crime. (NYPD)
Her grandson’s killer, Rasheed Baz, a livery cab driver from Lebanon, was upset about the massacre of Muslim worshipers days earlier in Hebron, Israel.
His lawyer argued Baz was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and thought the students in the van were going to attack him,
But Baz was convicted of murder in 1995 and sentenced to 141 years in prison. Two men who helped Baz hide the car he fired from were sentenced to probation after pleading guilty.