COLLEGE POINT, N.Y. — A Queens man has been sentenced to 12 years in prison for viscous 2009 attack on an openly gay man outside a College Point deli.
Daniel Rodriguez, 22, pleaded guilty last year to first-degree robbery as a hate crime in the attack on 49-year-old Jack Price.
On Oct. 8, 2009, Rodriguez, then 21, and Daniel Aleman, then 26, attacked Price as he was leaving the deli. Price recalled that Rodriguez grabbed him by the throat and accused him of writing graffiti on a wall.
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During the attack, which was captured on video, Price was pelted with anti-gay comments and pummeled to the ground, leaving him with a broken jaw, fractured ribs and collapsed lungs, according to police.
Price said the two men called him a “stupid faggot” and “dumb faggot” in Spanish. Price was hospitalized for three weeks, and the incident sparked
a large anti-bias rally in his neighborhood.
Since the attack, Price has been physically incapable of continuing to
work as a superintendent at three College Point buildings where he was employed, and has decided to move out of state, according to the
New York Daily News.
“I need to start a new life because they took my old life from me,” Price
said in a statement prosecutors delivered to the judge.
A sobbing Rodriguez told Queens Supreme Court Justice Barry Kron, “Through the grace of God I hope someday Jack Price will forgive me.”
His accomplice, Aleman, was sentenced last month to eight years in prison.
