A former School of Visual Arts student who slashed a Muslim taxi driver in the neck while shouting, “This is your checkpoint, mother f—-cker!” was carted off for a 9-year-prison sentence yesterday, but not before apologizing to the victim in court.
“I failed in every aspect of my life during the days of my alcoholism,” Michael Enright, 24, said as more than a dozen of his family members and friends sat in the audience of Manhattan Supreme Court.
“I am sorry from the bottom of my heart and I will spend each day that I have to right my wrongs to you,” he said, meaning victim cabby Ahmed Sharif, who was not present in court.
Prosecutors had asked for a sentence twice as long for Enright, who had struck up a conversation with the Bangladeshi driver during the Manhattan cab ride before beginning a rant against Islam and then shoving a knife into the partition.
“Me and my family are still shocked about what happened,” Sharif, a father of four, said of the August, 2010 attempted murder and hate crime, in a statement read into the record by prosecutor James Zaleta.
“We are still scared. I am scared to work as a taxi driver in New York City” the victim said.
Enright had been an alcoholic since age 12, and had suffered post-traumatic stress after working on his senior film thesis in Afghanistan, but while on bail has undergone psychotherapy and successfully gotten sober through Alcoholics Anonymous, his lawyer, Lawrence Fisher, told Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Richard Carruthers.
“We will hear good things from him when he gets out of court,” the lawyer added after court.