Sanna ChuA man who assaulted two women and slashed a third victim inside of an East Village subway station was sentenced to 15 years in prison today.
On Sept. 30, 2010, Godfrey Molemohi, 54, approached Roxanna Christina Walitzki at the F train station at East Houston Street and Second Avenue and told her, “I want to touch you,” according to the office of District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr.
Ms. Walitzki, an N.Y.U. graduate student and opera singer, tried to flee her attacker, but he punched her in the neck, inflicting what was described in a sentencing memorandum as a “career-threatening” injury to her throat.
Mr. Molemohi then approached an unidentified woman and banged her head against a tiled wall.
Douglas Smith, a stand-up comedian, tried to help the second victim and was slashed from ear to chin with a boxcutter. He sustained “a deep laceration and permanent facial disfigurement,” according to the District Attorney’s office.
In June of last year, Mr. Molemohi was convicted of three counts of assault and one count of attempted assault. They were the latest in a series of criminal convictions that included farebeating, aggressive panhandling, and felonious assaults — “many inside the very same subway station” as the attacks, according to the sentencing memorandum.
In a statement submitted during sentencing, Mr. Smith said his attacker’s actions showed “no value for his own life or anyone else’s.”
“I remember him staring at me dead in the eyes while I took the stand to testify against him,” Mr. Smith said. “There was not a hint of remorse on his face. He appeared to be completely numb, unfazed by the position his actions had put him in.”
The sentencing came more than a year after the conviction, the District Attorney’s office explained, because the defendant launched a psychiatric defense after his trial. He was eventually declared mentally fit. In addition to 15 years in state prison, he was sentenced today to five years of post-release supervision.
