The deranged Manhattan man who slit a French tourist’s throat in a random Valentine’s Day “sneak attack” in Harlem was hit with a 25-year prison sentence on Wednesday.
Khalief Young, 28, was convicted of attempted murder last month in the unprovoked 2020 daylight attack on 27-year-old tourist Gabriel Bascou, who was slashed as he left an IHOP on Adam Clayton Boulevard with his girlfriend.
“Make no mistake, this defendant aimed to kill,” prosecutor Erin Erin Tierney said of Young in Manhattan Supreme Court Wednesday. “The defendant caused these guests in our city to suffer through what can be called a living nightmare.”
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro called the attack “unprovoked” and “vicious.”
“I can only imagine what memories are haunting the victim in this case and his significant other,” the judge said. “Going through what is clearly an unprovoked vicious attack on him and basically a sneak attack coming up from behind.”
Carro asked Young if he had anything to say before he handed down the sentence.
“Nah,” Young replied. “God bless.”
Bascou and his girlfriend, Manon Duma, were walking on Adam Clayton Jr. Boulevard near West 132nd Street around 11 a.m. on Feb. 14, 2020, when Young ran up and slashed him, according to police.
Shocking video showed Bascou in shock and bleeding on the sidewalk after the attack, as passersby rushed up to help him while Young fled the scene.
He was rushed to Harlem Hospital and remained in the ICU for 10 days before flying back to France with the help of a medical care team, prosecutors said.
Young was nabbed several days later when an alert cop spotted the fugitive.
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“The defendant never gave a second thought to any of the suffering experienced by Mr. Bascou,” Tierney told the judge Wednesday. “He just didn’t care and demonstrated this when he casually jogged away from the scene of the crime.”
The savage fiend looked “more like somebody who’s running late for a train rather than somebody who left another man to die on the streets for no reason at all,” the prosecutor said.
Young’s attorney, Norman Bock, told the judge that “the defendant continues to deny his guilt and he does plan to appeal.”
In a statement, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg called the attack “unconscionable.”
“Everyone deserves to walk the streets of New York City safely and I commend the immense strength of this victim, who recovered from this attack and returned to Manhattan to testify,” Bragg said.
The convicted slasher lived about two blocks from the pancake restaurant and had randomly attacked at least two others in the past, police sources told The Post at the time.
On Oct. 20 last year, he rang his neighbor’s doorbell and punched the woman in the face and kicked her several times, the sources said.
Four months earlier in June, he went into a deli on West 135th Street and slashed a deli worker in the neck, police sources said.
Prior to those two incidents, Young was arrested in March 2015 for criminal possession of a loaded firearm and spent a little less than two years in an upstate prison.
He was released on parole in April 2017.
