Sayfullo Saipov put his heartlessness on full display Wednesday before receiving a centuries-long prison term for massacring eight people on the West Side bike path in 2017.
At an emotional sentencing in Manhattan federal court, the 35-year-old listened for hours as his victims’ loved ones and those who survived his horrific truck attack described the devastation he wrought on the Hudson River Park bike path on a Halloween afternoon six years ago.
Saipov heard that one of his victims, Nicholas Cleves, would have turned 29 this Friday. Cleves’ mother, Monica Missio, said her only child would have been the same age Saipov was “when he intentionally murdered my son and seven others.”
“He took away Nicholas’s hopes and dreams,” Missio said, noting that Cleves was the only New Yorker killed in the attack.
Saipov also heard that he had something in common with another one of his victims, Ann-Laure Decadt, a 31-year-old Belgian mother of two who was cycling with her mom and two sisters when she was killed on a family vacation.
“Your youngest child and her youngest child were born in the same month,” Decadt’s mother, Lieve Wyseur, said, telling Saipov that he had destroyed both of their childhoods.
“Mr. Saipov, there is no God who can approve of killing innocent people, and certainly not a young mother,” she added.
But Saipov, who narrowly avoided the death penalty after his January conviction on murder and terrorism charges, showed no empathy.
After sharing his twisted interpretation of Islam for nearly an hour — reciting several hard-to-follow stories from the Quran through an Uzbek interpreter — Saipov told the court he believed his victims’ pain paled compared to that of Muslim people persecuted worldwide.
“I saw and I heard the victims’ families and friends. Tears of those families of the victims — maybe one handkerchief would hold their tears,” an unrepentant Saipov said.
“The courtroom would be filled up with the tears and blood of…
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