A Wells man who attacked NYPD officers with a knife had an untreated mental illness, lawyers say

Trevor Bickford enters a subway station in New York City on December 31, 2022. He pleaded guilty to stabbing three police officers in Times Square. Surveillance image from court documents

Trevor Bickford’s first psychotic symptom occurred in the spring of 2022, when he felt like his soul was being ripped from his body.

Over the next few months, more hallucinations began to appear: visions of a shadowy figure out of the corner of his eye, tingling in his hands and lips, the feeling that there was a leech on his face. Popping noises in his ears told him whether he was making the right decisions.

During the winter, the Wells native obsessively watched YouTube videos about Islam, prayed six hours a day and planned to travel to the Middle East to join the Taliban. On New Year’s Eve 2022, he went to Times Square in New York, where he attacked three police officers with a large knife he had brought with him from Maine.

Bickford, now 20, pleaded guilty in January to three counts of attempted murder and is scheduled to be sentenced Thursday in U.S. District Court in New York. He faces up to 120 years in prison.

Prosecutors say Bickford’s attack was an act of “radical Islamic jihad” that he planned for months by examining materials promoted by the Taliban and considering ways to kill as many officials as possible.

“The defendant’s crimes were premeditated and premeditated. The defendant planned to kill those who did not join the extremist branch of Islam that he embraced. “His goal was to kill as many military-age men working for the U.S. government as he could,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum filed in federal court.

They say a sentence of at least 50 years in prison with a lifetime of supervised release is the appropriate punishment for the “cruel attack” on police officers.

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 court document

But defense attorneys with the Federal Defenders of New York are asking a judge to impose a sentence of 10 years in prison with 15 years of supervised release. They say Bickford was ashamed of his actions and only received the mental health treatment he needed after his arrest.

“Three respected experts with extensive experience in terrorism-related cases are of the opinion that Mr. Bickford’s actions on December 31, 2022 were not the result of radicalization or extremism, but rather a product of persistent auditory, tactile and visual hallucinations,” said Attorneys Marisa Cabrera and Jennifer Brown wrote a letter to Judge P. Kevin Castel on April 25.

They asked Castel to consider the role that Bickford’s untreated mental illness played in his offending, the low likelihood of relapse given his current treatment, the abuse he experienced and suffered in his youth, and his demonstrated rehabilitation. They noted that Bickford’s hallucinations have decreased since taking antipsychotic medication.

In a letter to the judge, Bickford said he took “full responsibility for my terrible crime.”

“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.”

A DOWNWARD SPIRAL

In letters to the judge, Bickford’s attorneys, friends and family describe a young man who excelled in school and sports despite living in fear of an abusive father who pushed Bickford to take part in wrestling and pushed him to extremes Forced to diet when he was still young (9) to maintain his weight class. They said Bickford struggled with depression and became increasingly withdrawn in the months before the attack.

According to Bickford’s lawyers, his father began pushing him to participate in wrestling when he was nine years old, forcing him to eat extremely restrictive diets to ensure he made it into his weight class. Photo from a court document

After his father’s death in 2018, Bickford found himself in turmoil. He believed his father had died by suicide after Bickford cut off contact with him, and only recently learned that his father had died of an accidental overdose. Bickford fell into a deep depression, drank alcohol to ease his pain and once carved a large X into his chest, his lawyers said.

As Bickford began exploring different religions, he heard a loud popping sound in his ear and felt his tongue tingle when he opened the Koran, which he took as a sign that Islam was right for him, they said his lawyers. They described how his obsession with religion quickly increased as he changed the way he spoke, began attending mosques in Maine and New Hampshire, and prayed for hours every day.

When Bickford told his mother, Audra Simpson, in December 2022 that he believed he was a prophet and needed to travel to the Middle East, she asked local police for help. She took him to Spring Harbor Hospital on Dec. 10 because she was concerned about his psychotic behavior. He was taken by ambulance to Maine Medical Center and then released with a referral for outpatient treatment, a decision that infuriated Simpson, according to a letter she wrote to the judge.

“I was at a loss and exhausted, it was now 3am and all I wanted to do was go to bed. I felt deflated. “He was so obviously crazy that they wouldn’t even keep him for observation,” Simpson wrote.

In hospital records, staff noted that Bickford had “thoughts of harming others,” had “expressed intent to harm others,” and was at “risk of absconding,” according to court records.

His family then contacted the FBI and agents met with Bickford on December 13th. Bickford told agents that he had purchased a plane ticket to Jordan, but decided to cancel the trip so he could see his older brother the following weekend, according to court documents.

Sixteen days later, Bickford took a train to New York City, where he checked into the Bowery Hotel. Most of the time, he stayed in his room, watched YouTube videos, used a dark web app on his phone, and ate food he brought from home to save money.

On New Year’s Eve, Bickford donated $2,000 to a charity, deposited his sleeping bag and food in Queens, and then traveled to Times Square. He ate at a food truck, prayed and then attacked the officers with a machete-like blade while shouting “Allahu Akbar,” which means “God is great” in Arabic. The attack ended when one of the officers shot Bickford in the shoulder.

The victims are still recovering

Prosecutors say the attack “traumatized his victims – including those he forced to witness and witness a terrorist attack.”

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 had changed and the attack could end his career, prosecutors wrote.

All three officials told the United States Parole Board that they believed life in prison was the appropriate sentence.

Prosecutors told the judge that the sentence proposed by defense attorneys would be “totally inappropriate and inconsistent with the defendant’s conduct and the penalties imposed on similarly situated defendants.”

“After weighing his options, scouting the location of his target, and agreeing on his plan of attack, he packed a machete-like blade more than a foot long and set off one day into one of the most densely populated areas in the United States the most populated times — Times Square on New Year’s Eve,” prosecutors said. “He then ambushed three NYPD officers guarding the gathered revelers, shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and struck them with his blade.”

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