Stephen Sakai was sentenced to 50 years to life for killing an old friend and a fellow bouncer.
Sakai was convicted last month for the murder of buddy Wayne Tyson, 56, and the fatal shooting of bouncer Edwin Mojica, 41. But he was found not guilty for the killing of bouncer Irving Matos, 42. He received 25 years to life for both of convictions.
“Somebody who was dear to us was taken away by somebody who was more like an animal than a human,” said Mojica’s bother-in-law, Robert Cook.
Sakai still faces another murder charge, for a May 2006 shooting spree outside the Chelsea bar Opus 22 in which he allegedly killed one person and wounded three others.
Jurors had said they acquitted on the Matos murder because they found the eyewitness to that shooting suspicious – and several of them agreed that, if not for a few bonehead decisions, Sakai could have walked on all three.
“It was a bad idea for him to go on the stand,” one juror said. “[And] it was a bad idea for him to sign those statements [to police]. If they didn’t have those, he would have got off.”
Sakai testified using an offensive parody of an Asian accent. He said he was the victim of a vast police conspiracy that also claimed the lives of the three men he was on trial for allegedly killing. Sakai, who has never held a passport, claimed he’d been to the Far East often, whisked there on a private jet by a mysterious businessman interested in martial arts.