WASHINGTON — The crunch of punches echoed through a D.C. courtroom Tuesday morning as a video of an attack on a Metro train was played before the man responsible was sentenced.
William Nelson, of Morningside, was sentenced to three years of probation, including one year in a halfway house, for what Judge Yvonne Williams called a “brutal assault” on two teenagers and an adult as they rode the Green Line in June.
Nelson pleaded guilty in July to one count of felony assault and one count of misdemeanor assault in the case.
He insisted that the two high school students and the adult that he hit had started the incident.
“I’m sorry for what I did, but there’s a lot that they don’t know about what happened on that subway,” Nelson told the court.
The judge told Nelson that at best, according to his version of events, the teenagers had bruised his ego by doing what many teenagers, including herself, growing up taking the train in Chicago, do.
“Nowhere does that ever warrant assaulting another person’s child,” Williams told Nelson as she sentenced him.
“You’re 54-years-old. If you can’t get beyond that, then what are we doing,” she said.
Williams said she did not need to see some of the videos played in court because she had seen it on YouTube before the case was even assigned to her. She watched about 4 minutes of different angles of the attack on a laptop during the sentencing hearing.
Nelson stood staring forward in a button down shirt and dress pants as the mother of one of his teen victims told the court that the assault had seriously impacted her son’s life since his classmates and school staff saw the videos.
The mother, who WTOP is not identifying in order to avoid identifying her son, had briefly walked out of the courtroom crying as the videos were played.
“It’s hard for me to hear the video, because I relive it,” she said.
“My son’s father is 6 feet under, and, for the life of me, I can’t figure out why you were trying to put my son there too,” she said to Nelson
She told Nelson that although she believes many black men are wrongly imprisoned, he deserves to be behind bars.
“Thank you for making my job as a mother of a black son that much harder,” she said.
It was about 1 a.m. on Sun., June 7 when Nelson told the teenagers to stop kicking the glass of the Green Line train he was leaning. After an argument, the 16- and 17-year-olds moved away within the train, and Nelson followed. He punched one of them in the face as the train moved through the Anacostia and Congress Heights stations.
The second teen’s mother wrote in a letter to the court that her formerly outgoing son has now become a recluse after becoming a “mockery” at school. He had to withdraw from the final weeks of the school year.
“I forgive you, I do not hate you,” she wrote to Nelson. “You, as an elder of the young men … should have been more mature and more thoughtful,” the letter continued.
At least a dozen people wrote letters of support for Nelson, each saying that they knew Nelson as a peaceful person for whom the assault was out of character.
“I don’t think a day goes by … that he doesn’t feel (a) … tremendous amount of shame … tremendous amount of regret,” Nelson’s lawyer Gregg Baron said.
According to representations in the courtroom, the presentencing report found that Nelson only believed he “may have done a little too much” after telling the teenagers to stop. The report also says Nelson believed he was being portrayed as a bully.
