A Guyanese man who burned his girlfriend’s face with a hot iron while their three children watched was sentenced to 13 years in prison last week by a judge in Queens, New York who called the gruesome attack “horrendous and sick.”
According to the New York Daily News, Eric Persaud apologized to his girlfriend and asked her to be a good mother to their children.
“My actions were cowardly, and there was no excuse for losing my cool,” Persaud told Queens Supreme Court Justice Gregory Lasak.
Lasak admonished Persaud for forcing the woman to turn up the heat on the iron so he could permanently scar her for calling the cops over a previous attack, the Daily News reported.
“Your actions are some of the worst I’ve seen a man do to a woman,” Lasak told Persaud. “The actions that you took on that day were horrendous and sick.”
Prosecutors said Persaud, 36, flew into a rage on April 30, 2009, because she had called 911 a week before when he smashed her phone and computer. He threatened to kill her if she called the cops again, the report said.
When the woman refused to scorch herself with the iron, Persaud stuck a towel in her mouth and burned her on both cheeks while forcing her to turn up the heat, the report said.
When that wasn’t enough, he slashed her in the face with a razor blade, prosecutors further said.
The woman spent 11 days in the hospital.
The report said that Persaud called the woman hundreds of times from Rikers Island, begging her not to testify against him. Queens prosecutors had retrieved recordings of the phone calls and planned to use them against Persaud if he had gone to trial.
Persaud pleaded guilty to an assault charge last month.
