http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2010/09/12/2010-09-12_lemrick_nelson_stabbed_in_the_head_with_ice_pick_19_years_after_knifing_student_.html Nineteen years after he knifed a Hasidic student to death in the notorious Crown Heights race riots, Lemrick Nelson was stabbed in the head with an ice pick in Manhattan early Sunday.
Nelson, 35, was in stable condition at Harlem Hospital.
Police believe the cause was road rage: Nelson was coming over the George Washington Bridge from his home in New Jersey when a traffic dispute apparently boiled over into a physical confrontation.
Nelson was found lying unconscious outside his car on a bridge ramp near W. 168th St. just after 2 a.m.
An ice pick was found nearby. There was no sign of his attacker.
The family of Yankel Rosenbaum, the Jewish Orthodox doctoral student Nelson stabbed in the riots, called it Tanach justice.
"Thou who drowns someone else, will drown," said Isaac Abraham, a spokesman for the Rosenbaum family. "It is now that the stabber gets stabbed. To Nelson, a crime with a knife involved is like bagel and lox."
On Aug. 19, 1991, Nelson, then 16, was one of a group of young black men who rampaged through Crown Heights after Yosef Lifsh, a 22-year-old Hasidic Jew, accidentally ran down and killed Gavin Cato, a 7-year-old Guyanese boy.
The group threw rocks and bottles, then surrounded Rosenbaum, 29, a student from Australia who had nothing to do with the car accident.
Rosenbaum was stabbed several times in the back. Before he died, he identified Nelson as his attacker.
Three days of riots followed, exposing long-simmering tensions between the black and Jewish communities in Crown Heights.
Nelson, who years later admitted that he stabbed Rosenbaum, was acquitted at his first murder trial and walked away from a second trial that ended in a hung jury.
He was convicted in federal court of violating Rosenbaum's civil rights and served 10 years. He left prison in 2004.
In May, Nelson was quoted as saying that he had a toddler daughter and was living the quiet life of a sober family man in Hillside, N.J.
He went by "Ricky" and his neighbors did not know about his past at the heart of one of the city's darkest days.