Wells man sentenced to 27 years in prison for attacking NYPD officers with machetes

Trevor Bickford enters a subway station in New York City on December 31, 2022, hours before he attacked police officers in Times Square. Surveillance image from court documents

A Wells man will serve 27 years in prison for attacking police in Times Square on New Year’s Eve 2022.

Trevor Bickford, 20, was sentenced Thursday in federal court in New York after pleading guilty in January to three counts of attempted murder and three counts of assault. He faced up to 120 years in prison, although prosecutors demanded at least 50 years. His defense attorneys argued for 10 years, citing his age, his struggles with untreated mental illness and his history of abuse.

U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams said in a statement that Bickford’s sentence shows “that cowardly terrorist attacks are met with law enforcement’s unwavering determination to preserve New York City, our country and our core values ​​of freedom and democracy.” protect.” .”

Bickford, who was 19 at the time of the attack, fought three police officers with a machete about two hours before the start of the New Year. Prosecutors said he shouted “Allahu akbar” before hitting an officer in the head and going for another officer’s gun. He was stopped after an officer shot him in the shoulder.

The case drew national attention and sparked a response from U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who said in a statement Thursday that the case shows that the Justice Department “will always stand alongside its state and local law enforcement partners… and that includes, “to be relentless in prosecuting those partners who seek to harm officers.”

Before sentencing, both sides offered U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel their opinions on the young man who traveled from Maine to New York more than a year ago with the intention of killing as many police officers as possible in one of the most densely populated places kill in the country.

Federal prosecutors and Bickford’s defense attorney – federal public defenders in Southern New York – did not respond to emails Thursday afternoon asking to discuss the verdict.

Prosecutors had said Biddeford’s attack was a premeditated act of “radical Islamic jihad” that Bickford had planned for months by examining Taliban-sponsored material. They said Bickford “left his victims – including those he forced to witness and experience a terrorist attack – traumatized.”

Trevor Bickford’s attack was captured on officer body camera footage, including this image showing Bickford carrying out the attack. Courtesy of the U.S. Attorney’s Office

An officer working on his first day after graduating from the NYPD academy suffered a fractured skull and a laceration to the back of his head that required more than a dozen stitches. He missed more than three months of work. The second officer continues to suffer the pain of his injuries, relives the trauma of the attack and is afraid to return to Manhattan, prosecutors said.

The third officer still suffers from migraines, speech and memory problems and post-traumatic stress disorder, the prosecutor’s office said in its verdict. He couldn’t return to work. He said “everything in his life has changed and the attack could end his career,” prosecutors wrote in court documents.

But Bickford’s family, in letters sent to Castel, asked that they take a step back and reflect on Bickford’s troubling signs of untreated mental illness in the months before the attack.

In court papers, they described psychotic symptoms that first appeared in the spring of 2022 – hallucinations of shadowy figures out of the corner of his eyes, tingling in his hands and lips, the feeling of a leech on his face and popping noises that told him whether he was making the right decisions.

His family said they became alarmed when Bickford began obsessively watching YouTube videos about Islam, praying six hours a day and planning to travel to the Middle East to join the Taliban. This was out of character for a young man who had excelled in school and sports and had never before shown any interest in Islam.

According to court documents, Trevor Bickford attended the Civil Air Patrol program in Sanford, where he trained for two years and learned to fly an airplane. He had hoped to join the Air Force. Photo from a court document

High school friends said they later learned that Bickford lived in fear of an abusive father who was overly focused on Bickford’s participation in wrestling. Bickford became agitated after his father died of an accidental overdose in 2018, they wrote, before the hallucinations began and led him to explore different religions.

Weeks before the Times Square attack, Bickford told his mother he was a prophet and needed to travel to the Middle East. She took him to the hospital, concerned about his psychotic behavior, but he was soon released with a referral for outpatient treatment, according to a letter she submitted to the judge in which she urged him to have compassion for her son.

His lawyers, in letters to the judge, cited experts in terrorism cases who noted that Bickford’s attack was “not the result of radicalization or extremism, but rather a product of persistent auditory, tactile and visual hallucinations.”

Since Bickford’s arrest, he has now been receiving treatment and says he is ashamed of his actions.

In his own letter to Castel, Bickford said he took responsibility for what he had done.

“I didn’t know it at the time, but I was sick. I heard voices and sounds that weren’t there, but to me they felt real,” Bickford wrote. “When I attacked the officers, I had become someone else.”

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