Crown Heights Riot Fiend Lemrick Goes Free

By: Kati Cornell Smith

March 21, 2005 — Less than 14 years after the death of a Hasidic scholar stabbed at the peak of the Crown Heights riots, the man who wielded the knife is walking free.

Lemrick Nelson, 29, has been released from a halfway house where he lived for nine months while finishing a 10-year federal prison sentence for violating the civil rights of Yankel Rosenbaum.

Nelson’s lawyers told The Post he is working full-time in the bakery industry and intends to continue his education. “He’s looking to put all this behind him. But there’s not a day that goes by when he doesn’t think of Yankel Rosenbaum,” attorney Peter Quijano said.

Nelson, who was released earlier this month, was spared a possible life sentence in 2003 when a federal jury found that, although he stabbed Rosenbaum, he didn’t cause his death.

He is now living with his mother in New Jersey while he serves a 27-month term of probation, sources said.

Rosenbaum’s relatives believe it’s only a matter of time before Nelson engages in new violence.

“Lemrick Nelson is a bad person. Until I see something tangible to the contrary, he’s a threat to society,” the victim’s brother, Norman Rosenbaum, said in a phone interview.

Nelson was 16 years old when he attacked Rosenbaum, 29 on Aug. 19, 1991, during race riots sparked by the death of a black child who’d been struck by a car in the grand rebbe’s motorcade.

He beat a state murder rap the following year, but was convicted of federal civil-rights violations in 1997. A judge sentenced him to nearly 20 years, but an appeals court later tossed that verdict based on jury-selection problems.

Nelson’s 2003 retrial finally resulted in a standing conviction for violating Rosenbaum’s civil rights.