Brooklyn, NY – A St. Albans resident who was found guilty of assaulting a Jewish father in front of his children at Barclay’s Center in October 2014 has skipped out on his parole and has fled to Turkey.
Shawn Schrader was charged on six separate counts for hitting Leonard Petlakh in the face at an exhibition game between the Brooklyn Nets and the Maccabi Tel Aviv.
After an eight month long investigation, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office concluded that the assault was motivated by bias and included a hate crime charge in the six count indictment.
Petlakh, executive director of the Kings Bay Y in Sheepshead Bay, went to the hospital with a broken nose and lacerations to his face as a result of the incident.
While Petlakh did not see his attacker, his 14 year old son Daniel positively identified Schrader as the man who hit his father during the trial.
Schrader was reportedly arrested by an NYPD task force in St. Louis, after his Twitter feed announced that he was going to Missouri to protest the Michael Brown shooting.
It took jurors less than three hours to reject the hate crime charge while finding Schrader guilty of assault, menacing and endangering the welfare of a child.
Schrader was sentenced to two years of probation, 80 hours of community service and anger management classes.
While he showed up for his initial intake appointment with a probation officer, federal authorities informed the New York City Department of Probation that Schrader, who is now 27, had left the United States and is believed to be living in Turkey.
Candace Sandy, a spokesperson for the Department of Probation, said that a warrant has been issued for Schrader’s arrest.
It is unclear at this time if the Turkish government will be honoring its extradition treaty and returning Schrader back to the United States.
Schrader is no stranger to the authorities.
He filed a lawsuit against the NYPD in 2013, saying that he had been roughed up by police and arrested on three separate occasions during the Occupy Wall Street protests one year earlier.
Schrader said that his tussles with police gave him nightmares and “shattered his life,” causing him to drop out of New York University, where he had been studying classical piano on scholarship.
“I’ll never play Beethoven again,” said Schrader, who elected to study politics at The New School instead.
Among the injuries Schrader said he sustained at the hands of the NYPD were an injured thumb and a bloodied ear.
He said that he agreed to accept an $82,500 settlement with the NYPD because lawyers for the NYPD warned that they would fight him vigorously on every claim in his lawsuit.