One afternoon in late September 2022, Alison Russo, a lieutenant with the New York City Emergency Medical Service, was walking back to her station in Astoria, Queens, after lunch.
Ms. Russo, a 24-year veteran, was a half block from the station when a man charged her, brandishing a knife. He began relentlessly stabbing her, striking her more than 20 times, the police said.
The attack was caught on video, and a bystander who had witnessed the stabbing ran to Ms. Russo’s station to report the crime. She died of her injuries at a hospital. Ms. Russo, who was posthumously promoted to captain, had been just months shy of retirement.
Peter Zisopoulos, the man who stabbed her, was sentenced on Monday to 25 years to life in prison.
“Nothing will bring Captain Russo back,” Melinda Katz, the Queens district attorney, said in a statement. She added that she hoped “the pain and grief over her loss will lessen with today’s sentencing.”
New York City’s fire commissioner, Robert S. Tucker, in a statement called Ms. Russo “the best of the best” and “a longtime public servant and friend who has been missed every single day since her senseless murder in 2022.”
Mr. Zisopoulos, 37, was convicted in May of second-degree murder and criminal possession of a weapon by jurors in State Supreme Court in Queens. Justice Ushir Pandit-Durant, who presided over the trial, determined on Monday that Mr. Zisopoulos deserved the maximum sentence.
At the trial, Mr. Zisopoulos repeatedly denied that he was the attacker when confronted with footage of the stabbing, insisting in a flat voice that he had been asleep at the time and that he bore no similarities to the person captured on video. But witnesses testified to having seen him attack Ms. Russo.
One witness, James Orsaris, said that after the attack, Mr. Zisopoulos had chased him with the knife. Another, Janki Oomraw, said on the stand that he had followed Mr. Zisopoulos to the building where he lived, and then ran to Ms. Russo’s station to make the report of a woman being stabbed.
Mr. Oomraw intercepted John Nicosia, an emergency medical technician at the station, who went to the crime scene and was horrified to find that the victim was his colleague. Mr. Nicosia performed CPR, but without success. At the trial, an employee of the New York City medical examiner’s office testified that nine of Mr. Zisopoulos’s blows had penetrated or perforated Ms. Russo’s heart. Three more had struck her lungs.
As Ms. Russo’s colleagues tried to save her, Mr. Zisopoulos barricaded himself inside his apartment and refused to open the door. One of the police officers on the scene, a detective, testified that during the standoff, officers had removed the peephole to his door to see what he was doing inside. When Mr. Zisopoulos reached up to cover the opening, the police detective said, his hand was covered in blood.
When the police finally coaxed Mr. Zisopoulos out and arrested him, they found a knife in his pants pocket that bore DNA belonging to him and Ms. Russo.
At the trial in May, Mr. Zisopoulos’s lawyers tried to introduce evidence that their client was mentally ill. His mother had told the authorities that her son took medication for schizophrenia. But Justice Pandit-Durant denied the motion, saying that the defense lawyers had not filed a notice that would have let prosecutors prepare a rebuttal.
One of the defense lawyers, Jonathan Latimer, told jurors that Mr. Zisopoulos was not “astute” or “aware,” and so could not have formed an intent to kill, a key element of the second-degree murder charge he was facing. Mr. Latimer suggested there was “no explanation” for the attack on Ms. Russo.
A prosecutor, Jonathan Selkowe, disagreed, saying that Mr. Zisopoulos’s repeated stabbings demonstrated “a conscious, purposeful, intentional act.”
In the days following the attack, Ms. Russo’s colleagues spoke of her as “the mother of the station,” someone they turned to for help or advice. Mayor Eric Adams called her “one of our heroes.”
Ms. Russo, who was 61 when she died, was on track to retire when she turned 62.
Taylor Robinson is a Times reporter covering the New York City metro area.
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