Dominican American Trinitarios gang<\/a>, according to then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. She said Mora Nu\u00f1ez and his co-defendant were affiliated with the gang.<\/p>\nMore than 30 Customs and Border Patrol officers filled nearly every seat in the gallery of the courtroom on Monday. Mora Nu\u00f1ez apologized to the officer during a tearful statement to the judge.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wish I could go back in time and avoid everything that has happened,\u201d he said in Spanish. \u201cI also want to apologize to my family, which has suffered because of my actions.\u201d<\/p>\n
Prosecutors said Mora Nu\u00f1ez shot CBP Officer Joshua Sinclair while attempting to rob him. Sinclair was sitting on the rocks in the park shortly before midnight, beneath the George Washington Bridge, and talking with a friend when Mora Nu\u00f1ez approached, according to court papers. Prosecutors said he had stolen another woman\u2019s cellphone moments earlier.<\/p>\n
Mora Nu\u00f1ez stood less than two feet away from Sinclair, pointed a gun toward the off-duty officer\u2019s head, and pulled the trigger twice, hitting him in the face and arm, according to the U.S. attorney\u2019s office. Sinclair fired back with his government-issued Glock, hitting Mora Nu\u00f1ez in the lower body, prosecutors said.<\/p>\n
Mora Nu\u00f1ez hopped on the motorbike of his co-defendant, Christhian Aybar-Berroa, and fled to a nearby hospital. Sinclair, meanwhile, had blood rushing from his face and feared he would die, he testified at a pre-sentencing hearing. An NYPD officer rushed him to a hospital, where he remained for 12 days and underwent several surgeries.<\/p>\n
Sinclair did not speak during the sentencing hearing, but in a letter he asked the judge for the maximum possible punishment. The officer said he had \u201cdefied the statistics working against Black male foster children in America,\u201d survived living in high-crime neighborhoods and graduated from college with honors, only for the failure of multiple systems to lead to his shooting.<\/p>\n
In his letter, Sinclair cited officials\u2019 failure to rein in gun violence, law enforcement\u2019s failure to apprehend Mora Nu\u00f1ez for another crime he allegedly committed in Massachusetts, and the immigration system\u2019s failure to prevent Mora Nu\u00f1ez and Aybar-Berroa from entering the country.<\/p>\n
Because of those failures, Sinclair said, he had depleted his sick time, strained many of his relationships, struggled to navigate the complicated worker\u2019s compensation and healthcare systems, and endured lasting trauma.<\/p>\n
\u201cI ask you, with the power that you hold in your hands, to please not fail me or the other hard-working citizens who have done everything they can to not fail,\u201d Sinclair said in his letter to Preska. \u201cAlthough their maximum sentences don\u2019t seem to match up to the level of destruction they have committed or had hoped to commit, anything less would feel like yet another missed opportunity to not fail.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mora Nu\u00f1ez\u2019s attorney, Jarrod Schaeffer, asked for a shorter sentence of 6-and-a-half to 8 years in prison. He noted his client\u2019s young age and extensive history of trauma, as well as his 1-year-old daughter, whose childhood he hopes not to completely miss.<\/p>\n
In a pre-sentencing memo, Schaeffer said that as a child and teen, Mora Nu\u00f1ez was physically abused, was exposed to rampant crime and witnessed two homicides. He dropped out of school at age 12 and also started abusing alcohol and drugs at a young age, according to the defense attorney.<\/p>\n
In addition to a prison sentence, Preska ordered that Mora Nu\u00f1ez receive mental health and substance abuse treatment. She sentenced Aybar-Berroa to 12-and-a-half years for serving as an accomplice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Dominican immigrant who shot and seriously injured an off-duty U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer during a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":365173,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[75,84,83,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-365172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-manhattan","tag-manhattan","tag-manhattan-headlines","tag-manhattan-news","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365172\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/365173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}