GUILTY PLEA IN ROCKLAND COUNTY PSYCHIATRIC CENTER KILLING

Rockland County District Attorney Thomas P. Zugibe announced that Curtis Wilson, age 53, residing at 140 Old Orangeburg Road, Orangeburg, NY pled guilty 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.

On January 16, 2012, at approximately 5:16 p.m., Wilson 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 today’s entrance of a guilty plea, Wilson has 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. Based on the defendant’s guilty plea, prosecutors have recommended a sentence of 23 years in state prison, with five years’ post-release supervision.

Wilson, a former resident of the City of Newburgh, is scheduled to be sentenced on March 27, 2013 before the Honorable Judge William A. Kelly. He remains held at the Rockland County Jail.

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