A New York man who groped a woman in the subway and tossed her onto the tracks when she fought back has been sentenced to 27 years in prison.
Kimani Stephenson, 25, also will be monitored for five years when he is released on his conviction of assault and sex abuse. Actor Bonnie Currie, 23, survived the ordeal at a lower Manhattan subway station when onlookers rescued her before a train could arrive. She suffered a dislocated shoulder and broken wrist.
“I think what you did was horrific,” Justice Stephen Antignani told Stephenson at the sentencing in Manhattan.
The judge described the scene as one of “the scariest, most heinous things you can do to a person,” The New York Post reported.
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The incident took place at about 4 a.m. on April 14 as Currie waited on a subway station platform. Stephenson walked up and grabbed her breast and crotch, at which point she told him to “f— off,” the New York Daily News reported. That’s when Stephenson pushed her onto the train tracks.
“Nothing in me can comprehend that in a split moment, I was then flying full force to the subway tracks,” Currie said at Stephenson’s sentencing at Manhattan Criminal Court.
“I cannot understand why, after I had rejected this complete stranger’s claim to my body, his next thought … was to throw me on the train tracks and leave me there,” the News quoted Currie as saying. “I thought I was going to die.”
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Currie said she found she could not move but two people who’d entered the station pulled her to safety.
“If those people did not come to my rescue, I would have been hit by a train,” the Post quoted Currie as saying.
Stephenson was found guilty in July of the assault and sex abuse charges but acquitted of attempted murder. His lawyers argued that authorities had the wrong person.