The suspect from last year’s Hanukkah stabbing in New York has been deemed unfit for trial and will receive mental health treatment.
In a Monday court order, U.S. District Court Judge Cathy Seibel declared that the suspect, 37-year-old Grafton Thomas, will be taken to a facility to decide if he “will attain the capacity to permit criminal proceedings to go forward against him,” according to ABC News.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons will give the court an update on his treatment within a month of his being transferred to the facility. Seibel ordered that the treatment is not to exceed four months.
Thomas was arrested after he allegedly broke into the home of a Hassidic rabbi in Monsey, New York, in December and stabbed five Orthodox Jews gathered there for a Hanukkah celebration with a machete. One of the wounded victims, 72-year-old Josef Neumann, succumbed to his injuries in late March.
Thomas was indicted on a number of charges, including murder, attempted murder, and hate crimes, as prosecutors claimed the attack was racially motivated. Journals belonging to him were found with handwritten, anti-Semitic content, and he had researched Adolf Hitler online prior to the rampage.
Thomas’s attorney, Michael Sussman, claimed that his client suffers from “severe psychiatric issues” and has been hospitalized in the past.
“I have stated from the very outset that, based upon my investigation, this was not an act of domestic terrorism,” Sussman said Monday. “While others were making that claim and inflaming the public, I stated that Mr. Thomas had a long, well-documented history of mental illness and that, tragically, this motivated his conduct in late December.”
Sussman added he thinks that Thomas should receive “long-term treatment and hospitalization” following the ruling.
