A gangbanger awaiting trial for murdering his pregnant girlfriend was sentenced Wednesday to 10 years in prison for stabbing a Rikers Island correction officer 12 times in the head, prosecutors said.
Dennis Applewhite, 29, pleaded guilty Feb. 7 to a charge of attempted assault in the first degree for the unprovoked attack on the officer on Halloween last year in a protective custody unit in the Anna M. Kross Center on Rikers Island.
“The defendant stabbed the victim, a DOC Correction Officer, a dozen times in the head with a sharpened metal,” said Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark. “This was a brazen, unprovoked attack against a Correction Officer who was working his shift in the Protective Custody Unit in Rikers Island.”
Benny Boscio, the president of the Correction Officers Benevolent Association, said Applewhite was trying to kill the officer and that the 10-year sentence “doesn’t go nearly far enough.”
“This brazen and unprovoked vicious assault on our officer was nothing short of attempted murder,” Boscio said.
More than 80% of the inmates in our custody are facing violent felony charges and they don’t stop committing violent crimes while they are in jail. Without meaningful consequences for these types of assaults, no one in our jails can be safe. It’s time to stop coddling violent felons and start protecting our officers.”
Applewhite, who is 6-foot-6, walked up to the 28-year-old officer about 4:45 p.m. on Oct. 31 and stabbed him repeatedly in the back of the head with an eight-inch piece of sharpened metal, prosecutors said.
Other correction officers sprang to their colleague’s aid and wrestled Applewhite to the floor. The badly wounded officer suffered multiple lacerations to his head and a puncture to the right side of his neck that left him still unable to fully turn his head.
Mayor Adams visited the officer in the hospital later on the day of the attack, calling it a “vicious and senseless attack.”
Applewhite remains held without bail in the North Infirmary Command on Rikers Island, where he is awaiting trial for the murder of his pregnant girlfriend.
He is accused of shooting Brittani Duffy, 28 in front of her young son at the Vladeck Houses on Madison St. near Jackson St. on the Lower East Side on Nov. 11, 2021, police said.
He was arrested in February, 2022 Duffy clung to life for days before she died from her wounds.