74°
YONKERS, N.Y. – A Yonkers man faces up to 25 years in prison after a jury convicted him in the 2011 beating of his disabled mother.
Albert Crooks, 39, was found guilty of first-degree assault and third-degree criminal possession of a weapon, both felonies, Wednesday in state Supreme Court in White Plains. It took the jury a little more than 3½ hours to convict Crooks. The jury spared him of an attempted murder charge.
The verdict capped less than a full week of testimony in which Crooks’ mother, 59-year-old Julia Winters, took the stand along with a pair of medical experts.
In a statement, the Westchester County District Attorney’s Office said that just after 1 a.m. Sept. 23, Crooks, 31, and his mother were arguing inside her St. Casimir Avenue apartment. Crooks snapped, prosecutors said, and hit his mother with a heavy glass ashtray, then with his fists and finally with a wooden table leg.
Yonkers police found Winters, a stroke survivor who uses a walker and motorized scooter to get around, outside a neighbors' door. At the hospital, she was treated for a fractured orbital bone and several lacerations.
Crooks was arrested about three weeks later and charged in the attack. He has been held at the Westchester County jail on $100,000 bail since his arrest and will be sentenced on Oct. 2.
Comments