BY DUNCAN OSBORNE | After deliberating for roughly two days, a Manhattan jury last week convicted Bayna-Lekheim El-Amin on four of five felony charges resulting from a 2015 fight he had with two gay men in a Chelsea restaurant.
“There was no justification for this brutal attack,” Cy Vance, the Manhattan district attorney, said in a May 25 statement. “Bayna-Lekheim El-Amin struck both victims in a public restaurant with a heavy wooden chair, knocking one of them unconscious. I commend the victims for their courage and my office’s prosecutors for ensuring this defendant is held accountable for this horrific attack.”
The jurors, who appeared to be at loggerheads at points in their deliberations, found the 42-year-old guilty of two counts of attempted assault in the first degree for the fight with Jonathan Snipes, 33, and Ethan York-Adams, 26, plus two counts of second-degree assault. El-Amin was acquitted on a fifth count that charged him with second-degree assault for allegedly stomping on Snipes’s head. When he is sentenced on June 14, El-Amin could get up to 15 years in prison.
Jurors began deliberating on May 23 and very quickly sent a note to the judge, Arlene Goldberg, saying they could not reach a verdict. On the morning of May 25, jurors asked what would happen if they reached a verdict on only four of the five counts. They were then allowed to announce their verdicts on the four and instructed to continue deliberating on the outstanding charge of first-degree attempted assault on Snipes. They returned a guilty verdict on that charge later in the day.
The case has been fraught from the start.
The fight broke out on May 5, 2015, at the Dallas BBQ at Eighth Ave. and W. 23rd St. in Chelsea. The day after the fight, Snipes contacted the press, claiming that he and York-Adams, his boyfriend at the time, had been the victims of a hate crime perpetrated by two men. One video showed El-Amin hitting York-Adams with a wooden chair as York-Adams and Snipes stood with their backs to El-Amin.
The incident received some press attention, and one protest was organized outside the restaurant that included Councilmember Corey Johnson and state Senator Brad Hoylman. Both politicians are openly gay and both represent districts that include Chelsea.
More complete video of the incident, which went public a few months after the story broke, however, showed that it was Snipes, in fact, who started the fight and that only one man fought with Snipes.
El-Amin was not charged with a hate crime. In fact, according to his lawyer, El-Amin is also gay.
When he testified, Snipes said he heard someone say the word “faggot” and he believed that person was El-Amin, so he hit him with his purse. The incident, which lasted about one minute, had three discrete parts. At the trial’s outset, prosecutor Leah Saxtein said that El-Amin was not charged with any crime relating to the first part of the fight, when El-Amin pounced on Snipes after being struck. In the videos that were played in court, Snipes appears to strike El-Amin in two of the parts of the fight.
The third part, where El-Amin used the wooden chair, was always the greatest threat to him because both Snipes and York-Adams are turned away from him. Yet, El-Amin’s attorney argued his client was acting in self-defense throughout the incident.
Both Snipes and York-Adams testified that they were drunk and both men received medical attention from an E.M.T. medic following the incident. They both refused a trip to an emergency room, though, saying they did not have insurance and could not afford the trip. This suggested they did not believe their injuries were serious.
