Massachusetts driver who repeatedly hit Asian-American man gets 18 months in prison

BOSTON (AP) — A Massachusetts man has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for threatening to kill a group of Asian Americans and hitting one of them multiple times with a car.

John Sullivan, a white man in his 70s, was sentenced Wednesday after pleading guilty in April to a federal hate crime charge of intentionally causing bodily injury to a victim with a dangerous weapon because of his actual and perceived race and national origin.

“Attacks fueled by hate and racial violence have no place in our society,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement. “This defendant targeted this man solely because he was Asian American. Such conduct will not be tolerated, and the Justice Department remains steadfast in its commitment to vigorously prosecuting those who commit unlawful acts of hate.”

In December 2022, Sullivan confronted a group of Asian Americans, including children, outside a Quincy post office. He shouted “go back to China” and threatened to kill them before repeatedly hitting one of them, a Vietnamese man, with his car. Prosecutors said the victim fell into a construction ditch and was injured.

There has been a surge in verbal, physical and online attacks against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders since the coronavirus pandemic, which is believed to have originated in China. Stop AAPI Hate, a reporting center, documented more than 9,000 incidents — mostly reported by victims — between March 2020 and June 2021. Last year, the FBI reported a 7% increase in overall hate crimes in 2022, even as the agency’s data showed anti-Asian incidents in 2022 were down 33% from 2021.

Jodi Cohen, special agent in charge of the FBI in Boston, said all communities in Massachusetts “deserve respect and the opportunity to live, work and raise their children without fear.”

“What began as a simple trip to the post office turned into a nightmare for this Vietnamese man when John Sullivan decided to target him because of the color of his skin and the country of his ancestors,” Cohen said in a statement. “There is no way to undo the damage Mr. Sullivan has caused through his hateful, abhorrent and brutal behavior, but I hope today’s sentencing provides some measure of comfort.”

Sullivan’s attorney argued in a sentencing memorandum that his client should not be tried on that single charge alone. They asked for six months of house arrest and three years of supervised release.

“There are bad people who do bad things and good people who do bad things,” the attorney wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “Jack Sullivan is a good person who made a bad decision on the day he committed this crime. Jack will face the consequences of his bad decision. His past suggests that his conduct in this case was an aberration, not the norm.”

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