The lawyer for the suspect in the stabbing during a Chanukah party in Monsey has requested a federal competency evaluation. Attorney Michael Sussman says a psychiatrist concluded that Grafton Thomas is not competent to stand trial. Now the U.S. Attorney’s office has two weeks to respond. Thomas has pleaded not guilty to attempted murder charges in the Dec. 28th stabbing that left five people injured at Rabbi Rottenberg’s home in Forshay. The 37-year-old also faces federal hate crime charges. Sussman issued a statement to reporters saying that he had asked the federal court, where Thomas faces hate-crime charges, to keep his motion, Levin’s report, and other documents under seal, to retain the privacy of personal health matters. “Pending the court’s determination on my motion, I shall have no further comment on these matters,” Sussman wrote. Sussman told the media in December that a search of Thomas’s homes in Wurstboro, where he lived for two years before moving back to his mother’s home in Greenwood Lake, uncovered many signs of deep mental illness including bottles full of prescription psychotropic drugs that he had not taken. Sussman said Thomas stopped taking the antipsychotic medication Latuda in October. “We have someone who has a discernable, longstanding pattern of mental illness, a mother who’s an RN who’s calling repeatedly for assistance,” he said in December, saying the system had repeatedly failed. Thomas has a long history of mental illness and hospitalizations, but no history of violence and no convictions. (YWN World Headquarters – NYC)

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