Bloody photos of the West Side bike path massacre presented to jurors at Saifullo Saipov’s death penalty trial

The Manhattan federal prosecutor’s office showed jurors bloody photographs of the victims of a truck attack on a bike path in Hudson River Park on Tuesday, asking them to sentence terrorist Saifullo Saipov to death for “brutal and calculated” mass murder.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Amanda Hole said in her opinion that Saipov was “committed to the long game” in his bloodthirsty quest to kill as many Americans as possible in an ISIS-inspired jihad on Halloween 2017.

Saipov, 35, was found guilty of 28 murders and terrorism on 26 January.

“Here the defendant killed eight innocent people. He stole eight lives,” Howl said. She later added, “He deserves the harshest punishment the law provides.”

Hole showed photos of the mutilated corpses of the victims in the bike tub after Saipov mowed them down in a 6,000-pound flatbed truck he rented in Passaic, New Jersey.

Hole said that Saipov wanted to inflict “deep suffering” on the loved ones of his victims. She said that he had begun planning the crime long before the bloodshed.

“He told the FBI that he started monitoring ISIS three years before the attacks. And the defendant had an idea [commit] attack a whole year before he committed it.

After the prosecutor showed the jury photos of the autopsy, the onlooker, later revealed to be the husband of an FBI agent, suffered a medical episode, prompting court officials to call emergency services.

Saipov’s attorney David Patton unsuccessfully asked Judge Vernon Broderick for a mistrial over the man’s reaction to the photos.

In his closing remarks, Patton asked the jury to show humanity, which Saipov denied to his victims.

“We ask you to make a decision for life, to decide that the appropriate moral decision here is life. Not because Mr. Saipov did not cause extraordinary harm, he did. But for some other very fundamental reasons that have nothing to do with liking him,” Patton said.

“It is not necessary to kill Saifullo Saipov,” the defender continued. “To meet death with more death is not the answer.”

Neither Saipov nor his lawyers deny that he committed the murder. He chose to stand trial rather than plead guilty when prosecutors announced their intention to seek the death penalty.

Lawyers for an Uzbek immigrant who came to the US in 2010 after winning the visa lottery alleged during the trial that he was brainwashed for long hours by indulging in conspiracy theories online as a truck driver.

Patton argued that keeping his client alive would not get him through, noting that in the supermax prison where he would be sent, ADX Florence, located in the middle of the high desert in Colorado, Saipov would one day die “in obscurity.” neither as a martyr nor as a hero to anyone.”

The lawyer argued that the love of Saipov’s older relatives and three children born in the United States for him was worth sparing his life.

“I think about his family and how they can’t help but believe that the old Saifullo they once knew is still out there somewhere, and that maybe in a year, in ten years, or maybe and longer, on one of those 15-minute calls, he might just say something like, “Oh my god, what did I do?” Patton said.

“We ask you not to exclude such a possibility,” the lawyer added. “We ask you to choose hope over fear, justice over revenge, and in the end, life over death.”

Prosecutors called family members of the victims who testified to the impact of their grief and trauma after the loss of loved ones.

The attack killed Anne-Laure Decadt, 31, a Belgian mother of two; five men from Argentina, Hernan Mendoza, Diego Angelini, Alejandro Pagnucco, Ariel Erliy and Hernan Ferrucci, who were in town with five other high school friends to celebrate 30 years of friendship; and Darren Drake, 32, from New Jersey, and 23-year-old New Yorker Nicholas Cleaves.