In the sedate evening twilight that shrouds Manhattan’s Upper East Side, a scene of unwarranted violence unfolded, jolting the neighborhood’s serene façade. At the center of this tempest—seventy-year-old David Paterson, a man who navigated the turbulent waters of New York politics to rise to the office of Governor, now serving as a lobbyist for the mighty Las Vegas Sands, and his stepson, young Anthony Sliwa, just 20 years of stepping into the vastness of this world.
Despite the mantle of Paterson’s prestigious past and the shadows cast by his legal blindness, assailants—void of respect or recognition—launched a brutal attack. The former governor felt the sting of an unforgiving fist, while Anthony met the harsh concrete, his young frame kicked as he lay upon the unforgiving sidewalk. Their assailants: two young men—a malicious duo spurring two boys, barely past their childhood, into a frenzy of gang assault.
Like characters plucked from a novel, two city housing authority workers embody the antagonists. Travor Nurse, 40, charged for his role with a second-degree gang assault, and an additional assault that took into account Paterson’s age. His cohort, 34-year-old Diamond Minter, faces similar charges for the orchestrated violence.
The pawns in this grim narrative, the boys, ages 12 and 13, find themselves ensnared in the adult’s sinister plot, both charged with gang assault—the younger facing the gravity of the second degree, the older, the third. Somewhere in the fray, a third boy emerged, cast into the investigative spotlight by NYPD detectives, though fate left him untouched by charges.
The incident broke the evening calm around 8:30 p.m., a dispute lighting the fuse outside the mundane address of 1871 2nd Avenue.
In the narrative’s aftermath, Weill Cornell Medical Center’s halls and rooms embraced the victims as they sought healing. The New York Post whispered of the governor’s head injury, while Anthony’s visage bore the marks of his ordeal. Released the next day, they were left to nurse the physical echoes of their encounter.
Curtis Sliwa, Anthony’s father, and a not-unfamiliar name himself, having vied for New York City’s mayoralty, took to the digital halls of social media, his words echoing the pain and resolve of his son and Paterson. The violent brush, he lamented, underscored a city’s safety forfeited – leaving its families to count their losses to the pervasive specter of violence.
The Paterson clan voiced a restrained gratitude as the perpetrators surrendered to their faces in the cold light of justice. A plea carried in their words – for the youth entangled in this tale to find a lesson amidst the shadows of their actions.
In the wake of the assault, David Paterson, ever the statesman, found a moment to shine a light on Anthony’s valor. The young man, in the blink of an attack, had stepped into harm’s way – a gesture of courage that the former governor hoped might gleam with pride within his stepson’s heart.
Paterson continues, his career unbowing, to thread the ways and means through which the vast empire of Las Vegas Sands might lay its stakes into the soils of downstate New York. Yet, even as the city’s skyline reaches ambitiously for the heavens, this tale serves as a stark reminder that, rooted on the ground, the struggle for basic dignity and safety persists.