The Man Responsible for a 2019 Hanukkah Attack that Killed a Rabbi May Not Be Prosecuted

When 37-year-old Grafton Thomas showed up on the doorstep of Rabbi Chaim Rottenberg’s house, he was dressed as Death itself. 

It was December 28, 2019—the seventh night of Hannukah—in an ordinarily sleepy Orthodox Jewish hamlet in Monsey, N.Y. With a hood drawn down over his forehead and a very large knife holstered by his side, Thomas forced open the front door and stormed a candle-lighting ceremony, where around 100 Hasidic community members had gathered. According to an eyewitness, Thomas told the crowd something to the effect of “none of you are getting out of here” before slashing and stabbing indiscriminately, injuring five. Two of the victims were rushed to the hospital in critical condition, with one of them—72-year-old rabbi Josef Neumann—falling comatose and dying three months later.

After someone threw a table at Thomas, effectively neutralizing him, he fled to his car. But onlookers got his license plate number and reported it to police, leading to his successful arrest later that night, according to NPR.

For his crimes, Thomas was charged with six counts of attempted murder (one which was later upgraded to second-degree murder following Neumann’s death) as well as federal hate crime charges. But while being held in pretrial detention, Thomas was found mentally incompetent to stand trial, an evaluation that’s been reaffirmed multiple times. 

Thomas is currently housed at the Mid-Hudson Forensic Psychiatric Center, and there’s a strong change that he will never be formally prosecuted for his alleged crimes.

Competency to stand trial is a fundamental legal right enshrined by the 1960 Supreme Court ruling Dusky v. United States, which stated that a defendant must be able to rationally understand the court proceedings taking place. Thomas was diagnosed with schizophrenia after his arrest.

Daniel Murrie, a forensic psychologist and professor at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, has done over 1,000 competence evaluations. Murrie says that competency to stand trial is widely misunderstood by the public as a “get-out-of-jail free card,” when in reality it’s a legally justifiable reprieve for those mentally incapable of understanding their own case.

“It’s not fair to move someone through legal proceedings if they don’t understand how the court works,” Murrie tells A&E Crime + Investigation. 

But even then, Murrie adds, the reprieve is almost always temporary, because most of those deemed incompetent have their competency restored within a few months—at which point they do face their charges.

“Four out of five are restored [to competency]. And most of those are within three to six months,” Murrie says. “[Thomas] is in an unusual group.”

According to prosecutors, Thomas wrote in his journal about Hitler and the Nazis, and in the weeks immediately prior to his rampage, his online searches included “German Jewish temples near me” and “Zionist temples,” implying a potentially rational, coherent criminal motive. (His attorney, Michael Sussman, disputed that the journal entries were antisemitic, instead characterizing them as the ramblings of a “disturbed individual.”) 

At the time of his arrest, Thomas smelled strongly of bleach according to his criminal complaint—suggesting that he had tried to wash some of the blood out of his clothing, thereby destroying evidence.

But none of that behavior matters to a competency evaluation, Murrie explains. 

“That’s about legal sanity—the forensic question of if someone knew that what they were doing was wrong,” he continues. “Competence is here and now: Do they understand the system in a way that’s not compromised by symptoms of mental illness?”

Although there are obvious benefits to feigning incompetence, Murrie says there are also robust safeguards to catch defendants who might be faking or exaggerating symptoms, such as comparing how the defendant responds to their evaluation questions with the way others with the same ostensible mental illness have answered.

“There are structures for measuring,” Murrie says. “We’re gauging the credibility of the symptoms they’re reporting.”

Thomas’s next competency hearing is scheduled for January 2026. He was previously found unfit to stand trial in 2020, 2022 and 2024.

While Murrie says he cannot comment directly on a case that he isn’t working on, he believes that the odds are slim that someone would be restored to competence so far along into an attempted restoration process.

“It’s very unusual,” Murrie says, noting that there are exceptions, such as when a defendant refuses at first to take their medication and then later complies, but that “the more time that passes, especially after those first six months, the less likely it is to find someone restored.” 

Thomas cannot be held indefinitely. In New York State, defendants can be held for up to two-thirds of their maximum sentence in a mental health facility while remaining unfit for trial. Thomas faces multiple life sentences for his crimes.