TWENTY YEAR STATE PRISON SENTENCE IN ROCKLAND COUNTY PSYCHIATRIC CENTER KILLING

DA’S PRESS RELEASE

Rockland County District Attorney Thomas P. Zugibe announced that Curtis Wilson, 53, of 140 Old Orangeburg Road, Orangeburg, New York has been sentenced to a determinate term of 20 years in state prison on his January 10th, 2013 guilty plea to one count of Manslaughter in the First Degree, a class “B” Felony relating to a death on the campus of the Rockland Psychiatric Center in Orangeburg.

Upon release from state prison, Wilson will remain under post-release supervision for five years.

On January 16, 2012, at approximately 5:16 p.m., the defendant struck fellow Rockland Psychiatric Center resident Vincent Knadler repeatedly in the head with a two-foot long metal pole during an altercation.

Knadler was transported to Nyack Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 6:01 p.m.

Through the entrance of a guilty plea, Wilson waived the psychiatric defense. The defendant had previously been an inpatient in residential treatment on at least fifteen separate occasions at several New York psychiatric hospitals during the past 25 years.

Wilson was being treated at the facility during his sixteenth inpatient hospitalization at the time of the killing. First Assistant District Attorney James Mellion, Supervising Assistant District Attorney Dominic Crispino and Senior Assistant District Attorney Janine Kovacs prosecuted the case.