John Sullivan, an elderly man from Quincy, Massachusetts, has received an 18-month prison sentence for making threats to kill an Asian American group and for striking one man multiple times with his vehicle. The crime is part of a dramatic spike in verbal, physical and online attacks against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders that coincided with the start of the coronavirus, which is thought to have originated in China. In December 2022, Sullivan, a white man in his late 70s, drove by a group of Asian Americans including children outside a Quincy post office. He yelled “Go back to China” and threatened to kill them before repeatedly hitting one of them, a Vietnamese man, with his car. Prosecutors said the victim fell into a construction ditch and was injured.
Sullivan was sentenced Wednesday after pleading guilty in April to a federal hate crime - willfully using a dangerous weapon to cause bodily injury to a victim because of of the victim's actual and perceived race and national origin, The Associated Press reports. Sullivan’s defense attorney had requested six months of home confinement and three years of supervised release. “There are bad people who do bad things and good people that do a bad thing,” the attorney wrote in the sentencing memorandum. “Jack Sullivan is a good person who made a bad decision on the date of this offense. Jack will suffer the consequences of his poor decision. His background suggests his behavior in this case was an aberration and not the norm for him.”
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