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Teen Bias Attacker Gets Six Months

By —Tom Tracy

A 17-year-old Sheepshead Bay man was sentenced to six months in jail after pleading guilty to a bias attack last summer. A spokesman from the Kings County District Attorney’s office said that Charles Tabona admitted to striking 19-year-old Antonio Cortes in the head with a glass bottle as Cortes rode his bike to work on August 12. Tabona was reportedly enraged at the Mexican flag stitched proudly to Cortes’ backpack, officials said. When he was taken into custody, Tabona fired off a number of scurrilous and shameful slurs against Hispanics living in the neighborhood, officials said. Prosecutors said that Tabona was initially charged with assault in the second degree as a hate crime. A few months later, Tabona was re-arrested, this time for allegedly shooting himself in the leg. All of his crimes were sewn up into one guilty plea, which was made on January 6. Following his stint in prison, Tabona will be sentenced to four and a half years probation where he will be enrolled in the Dynamic Youth Residential Treatment Program, which will entail 15 months spent in a residential facility upstate, another year at an outpatient center in Brooklyn, a drug treatment program, and mandatory where “professionals could address violent, antisocial behavior,” prosecutors said.