Brooklyn lawyer who helped set fire to NYPD car during Floyd protests sentenced to a year and a day in jail

A federal judge ruled on Thursday that an Ivy League-educated Brooklyn lawyer who helped set fire to an NYPD vehicle during the 2020 George Floyd protests will spend one year and one day in jail.

Colinford Mattis bought gas and drove the getaway van while fellow lawyer Uruj Rahman threw a Molotov cocktail at a police car outside the 88th Precinct police station in Brooklyn on May 30, 2020.

The lawyer also burned his career in the process – he and Rahman were caught that night, and both have been disbarred since their arrest.

“You weren’t the instigator that night. Miss Rahman was,” Brooklyn Federal Court Judge Brian Cogan said in court on Thursday. In November, Kogan sentenced Rahman to 15 months in prison.

When he told Mattis about his fate, about a year and a day in prison and a year of supervised release, Kogan told him: “This is the best thing I can do for you. I would like to achieve more.”

Mattis graduated from Princeton University and New York University School of Law. He partnered with Pryor Cashman, where he specialized in startups, and served on Community Board 5 in Brooklyn.

“I’m 35 now and I never thought I’d be here today,” Mattis said in court. “I deeply regret and am embarrassed by what I did and said in May 2020. I really risked the welfare of others and ruined my life with my behavior that night.”

Mattis spoke about his three foster children and how he felt he let them down, and said he has since attended the program and sobered up.

“Mr. Mattis’s behavior that night was a shocking departure from a meaningful life of non-violence, community service and caring,” his lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, wrote in a November 2 letter to Kogan asking for time to be served.

“This break was spurred not only by the highly visible and highly publicized killing of George Floyd and the once-in-a-generation global pandemic protests that followed, but also by Mr. Mattis’s then untreated alcoholism and depression.”

Mattis first watched footage of Floyd’s murder just hours before the crime, and upon seeing Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than 9 minutes, he sobbed and burst into tears.

“Colin dealt with this combination of stress and trauma the only way he knew how: drinking,” she wrote.

The drinking led to angry text messaging with his friends and a plan to buy gas at a service station, make Molotov cocktails, and drive to the police station, where Uroy firebombed the police car.

Kogan said that Mattis could have played a very different role that night that would have convinced the public that Chauvin would get what he deserved through the legal system.

“On that terrible night, we really needed you, we really needed the lawyers to stand up and say, ‘Have you seen this tape? Did you see what happened to him? This will be dealt with, and it will not stand,” said Kogan.

“It hurts me to death to pass a sentence that will affect these children who have already suffered,” Kogan said of the Mattis children.

Mattis and Rahman were initially indicted by a federal grand jury on charges that could carry life sentences, and when they first pleaded guilty in October 2021, the duo faced 10 years in prison if the judge applied “terrorist amplification.”

Last year, however, the Brooklyn U.S. Attorney’s Office drastically reduced the amount of time they would ask, noting “mitigating facts and circumstances of the particular case” that led them to offer sentences of just 18 to 24 months. This led to a new guilty plea in June on charges of conspiracy to commit arson and manufacture and possession of an unregistered destructive device.

After his arrest and a month in prison, Mattis tried to make amends with the NYPD. He asked the police department to take part in a “restorative justice” program in which suspects are placed in the same room as their victims to talk about the harm caused by their actions, but the NYPD refused to participate, his lawyer writes.

“All I can do now is apologize and do my best to make things right,” Mattis said in court. “I contacted the NYPD Restorative Justice Unit. It shouldn’t have happened, and I understand that they didn’t want to do it.”

Mattis and Rahman received lighter sentences than 29-year-old Samantha Scheider, who threw a homemade bomb made from a Bulleit bourbon bottle at a busy police van in Crown Heights on May 29, 2020.

The bottle shattered the van’s window, but the liquid inside did not ignite, and four officers escaped the fiery fate. She was sentenced to six years in prison.