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| Brutal: Kevin McCarron is seen being beaten by several men, including one suspect wielding an aluminum baseball bat Read more: |
Three men involved in a near-fatal assault in Greenwich Village in January have been acquitted of the most serious charges of attempted murder. A jury decided yesterday that defendants Hatem Farsakh, 24, Sherif Rizk, 22 and Mahmoud Habib, 30, were found not guilty of attempted murder in the street brawl that left Andover, Massachusetts tourist Kevin McCarron, 24, with a fractured skull.
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| Victim Kevin McCarron flanked by defendants Hatem Farsakh and Sharif Rizk. |
McCarron was beaten with a tire iron, baseball bat, and other weapons, as well as punched and stomped repeatedly, by a group of men shortly before dawn in front of Artichoke Pizza on MacDougal Street. The fight broke out around 5 a.m., possibly because one of the defendants was sitting on the car McCarron and his friends drove into the city. Words were exchanged and the confrontation quickly escalated—one video showed McCarron's brother Patrick on his hands and knees in the street being beaten:
A Massachusetts man is savagely beaten outside pizza shop in Greenwich Village from Gothamist on Vimeo.
Farsakh claimed he had nothing to do with the attack, and was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. But the jury still found him guilty of felony gang assault, attempted gang assault and second-degree assault, the Daily News reports. Rizk, a student at Brooklyn College, was convicted of one count of second-degree assault for injuring McCarron's brother.
Habib, who claimed that he tried to break up the fight, was acquitted of all charges.
The defendants claimed throughout the trail that McCarron and his friends were looking for a fight and provoked the brawl using anti-Arab slurs. Rizk’s attorney, Spencer Leeds, vowed to appeal, telling the Daily News that McCarron’s group were the aggressors. "Any contact made [by Rizk] would have been in self-defense,” Leeds told the tabloid. MORE AT SOURCE
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