Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Second Brooklyn Hasid Cleared in 2013 Attack on Gay Black Man

Charges against a Hasidic man accused with four others of beating an African-American man in New York City have been dismissed.

Joseph Fried, 27, is the second member of the group to have charges dropped in the 2013 assault in Brooklyn of college student Taj Patterson.

Patterson, 24, lost vision in his right eye as a result of his injuries, which included a fractured eye socket and torn retina.

The only witness who had identified Fried recanted, according to the Daily News, which cited unnamed sources in Saturday’s editions.

Aharon Hollender, 29, whose case was dismissed in March, had his charges dropped for the same reason.

If convicted, Fried would have faced up to 25 years in jail.

Patterson, who is gay, told cops he was was attacked by a group of Haredi Orthodox men, some of them members of the Shomrim volunteer security patrol, while walking intoxicated through a predominantly Hasidic section of Brooklyn’s Williamsburg section. The victim filed a lawsuit last year against his five alleged attackers.

The attack was initially investigated as a hate crime because Patterson said his assailants yelled homophobic slurs, but none of the defendants were indicted on hate crimes charges.

The remaining defendants — Abraham Winkler, 40; Mayer Herskovic, 22, and Pinchas Braver, 20 — are scheduled to appear in court in February.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.