UPDATE: Brooklyn Man Gets 20 Years for Splitting Trans Woman's Skull

Photo via Kimball Hartman/Facebook

UPDATE, Jan. 14: Mashawn Sonds has been sentenced to 20 years in prison “on charges of first-degree assault as a hate crime for striking a 29-year-old transgendered woman in the head with a two by four piece of plexiglass,” according to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. “Hate led to the defendant’s conviction,” DA Ken Thompson said Thursday. ”Justice led to his sentence.”

Original story, posted Dec. 23, below.

BUSHWICK, BROOKLYN — Brownsville resident Mashawn Sonds, 26, has been found guilty of yelling anti-gay slurs such as ”We don’t want faggots on our block” at Kimball Hartman, a transgender woman, and her gay friend as they walked the streets of Bushwick late one night in October 2014.

Sonds then ”picked up a piece of plexiglass and swung it at the victim, Kimball Hartman,” who was 29 at the time, according to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. ”As she tried to get away he threw the plexiglass and struck her in the head.”

Hartman was knocked unconscious in the Oct. 12 attack on Bushwick Avenue near Halsey Street, the DA’s Office said, and began seizing and bleeding profusely from the back of her head.

“She sustained a traumatic brain injury, underwent surgery to her skull, and will likely suffer permanent injuries,” according to the DA.

A GoFundMe set up for Hartman by her friends right after the attack predicted a long recovery ahead.

“Kimy will have to wear a helmet, take 10 medications daily, attend outpatient medical appointments and brain rehab, and have 24 hour supervision at home,” the page said.

In spring of this year, Hartman wrote:

“My skull is back in the rest of my cranium now. But I’m sad now because I have to try to afford cosmetology to make my face and left side of head look normal again. I basically look like Frankenstein now.”

Sonds was found guilty Friday today of “first-degree assault as a hate crime” in Brooklyn Supreme Court. He will be handed his prison sentence on Jan. 13, 2016, which could be up to 25 years.

According to the DA’s Office, Sonds’ trial was the first victory for prosecutors in the office’s new Hate Crime Unit — formed less than a month after Sonds attacked Hartman.

“This defendant viciously attacked an innocent woman purely out of hate and left her on the ground for dead,” DA Ken Thompson said in a statement released Friday. “This was a cowardly, unprovoked and brutal attack on a person who was targeted merely because of her appearance.”