The man convicted of viciously beating a then-57-year-old woman with a hammer as she entered a Queens subway station, fracturing her skull as he bludgeoned her more than a dozen times in a violent 2022 robbery, was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in life in prison. And his victim, still recovering, was in court.
William Blount, 61, was found guilty in April of first-degree assault, robbery and other charges in the Feb. 24, 2022 attack on Nina Rothschild. Jurors said he was responsible for kicking Rothschild down the stairs of the Queens Plaza station in Long Island City, bashing her in the head repeatedly and stealing her belongings.
His lawyer had argued that prosecutors had the wrong man.
“This was an unprovoked attack that caught the attention of the entire country,” Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz said in a statement in part. “Our transit system must be safe for everyone and this conviction sends a strong message that those who cause mayhem on our subways will be brought to justice.”
The gruesome attack on Feb. 24, 2022, that left Rothschild hospitalized with critical injuries was captured on surveillance video. She was seen walking down the stairs as Blount, who was walking with a black cane, approached her from behind, prosecutors said.
He kicked her down the stairs and hit her in the head more than a dozen times with a hammer before taking off. Blount, 60, took her purse, which had some cash, two phones, two rings and credit and debit cards.
Rothschild spoke with NBC New York exclusively about a month after the attack and is expected to deliver a victim impact statement at Blount’s sentencing Thursday.
“I kept yelling stop, stop, stop, which of course was completely and utterly useless,” she recalled of the 2022 encounter. “I kept calling ‘Help, help, help, help!’ And fortunately two NYPD officers who were, I think, on the lower platform down by the trains came up.”
Then a researcher with New York City’s health department, Rothschild was treated at the hospital for multiple skull fractures. She had a bilateral craniectomy to repair her skull with titanium mesh, prosecutors said.
“Fortunately or unfortunately, I remember basically the entire thing from start to finish,” Rothschild told NBC New York. “I remember starting to go down the subway steps and feeling this blow to my head, which I initially thought was a baseball bat.”
Blount was arrested three days after the attack. A hammer, cane and Rothschild’s tote bag were found when a search warrant was executed at a home in Manhattan that belonged to a relative of Blount, which was also his last known residence.
Blount had a lengthy criminal record, including a jail escape attempt that left him with two broken ankles, law enforcement officials said. His record includes kidnappings, robberies and drug crimes in New York City and South Carolina dating to the early 1980s.
He was sentenced to 20 years for kidnapping, 15 years for burglary and five years (to run concurrently) for committing a crime of violence with a firearm in a case in which he and his brother broke into a Bojangles in South Carolina in 2000 and kidnapped two employees, making one open the safe.
Blount tried to escape while serving that sentence, South Carolina police say. It happened during the murder of a guard by other inmates amid a larger escape plot on Sept. 17, 2000. Blount tried to join the jailbreak, jumping from the prison roof and breaking both his ankles in the process. He was caught, and got hit with a conspiracy to escape charge on top of the other crimes for which he was jailed.
