Suspect in Monsey Stabbings Searched Online for 'Hitler,' Charges Say

pulse 09:01 - 31 December 2019

In his journal, prosecutors said, he wrote about Hitler and “Nazi culture.” On his phone, he searched online for “why did Hitler hate the Jews” at least four times and looked for “prominent companies founded by Jews in America.”

On Monday, new details emerged about the man accused of stabbing five Jewish people at a Hanukkah celebration in the New York suburbs when federal prosecutors filed hate crime charges against him.

These details, according to a criminal complaint, could suggest what led the man, Grafton Thomas, to go on a bloody rampage on Saturday in Monsey, New York, a hamlet northwest of New York City with a large community of ultra-Orthodox Jews.

The charges against Thomas came as police departments across New York and New Jersey stepped up patrols in Jewish neighborhoods and dispatched officers in front of synagogues and yeshivas.

The complaint was filed in U.S. District Court in White Plains, New York, by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Thomas, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, appeared in court shortly after 2:30 p.m. Eastern time Monday.

“Are you clear in your head?” Magistrate Judge Paul E. Davison asked him.

“Not clear, your honor,” said Thomas, who added that he needed rest.

Thomas’ family has said that he has a long history of mental illness, including schizophrenia.

But prosecutors, in the complaint, suggested that Thomas, who is from the nearby village of Greenwood Lake, New York, had a history of anti-Semitism. In one piece of writing, he used a phrase that investigators said appeared to reference the Black Hebrew Israelite movement, a fringe religious movement with offshoots that have been described as hate groups.

The assault in Monsey further rattled the Jewish community in the New York region after a series of anti-Semitic incidents in New York City last week and a deadly mass shooting in Jersey City, New Jersey, that targeted a kosher supermarket earlier in the month.

In an interview Monday morning on NPR, the public radio network, Mayor Bill de Blasio said of the recent attacks: “We consider this a crisis. Really, there is a growing anti-Semitism problem in this whole country.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .