A man in Washington state was convicted of a hate crime and sentenced to 30 months in prison Monday in the wake of a 2018 incident in which he threw a rock at a Black man and called him slurs.
A Kitsap County Superior Court jury convicted Robert Patrick Maykis, 49, of second-degree assault and malicious harassment along with two sentencing enhancements for using a rock as a deadly weapon, according to the Kitsap Sun.
“This is something that injures the community and the victim and doesn’t go away,” prosecutor Ben Turner told the newspaper.
He later added: “I wanted this to be a clear message that this behavior is not going to be tolerated.”
The conviction stems from an incident from Feb. 9, 2018.
The victim was on his way home from work at a Veterans Affairs office when he urinated behind a business, according to court documents the Kitsap Sun obtained.
That’s when a man later identified as Maykis got out of a parked van on the other side of a fence blocking the victim and started yelling the n-word and other slurs at the man, the newspaper reported.
Maykis, of Bremerton, reached over the fence, tried to punch the victim and hit him with a rock to the leg, the Kitsap Sun reported.
Officials told the newspaper the victim had a medical condition causing him to feel the urge to urinate frequently.
