Two men from Los Angeles County were sentenced to federal prison after they pleaded guilty to assaulting five people at a family-owned Turkish restaurant in Beverly Hills in 2020.
The men, 23-year-old William Stepanyan of Glendale and 24-year-old Harutyun Harry Chalikyan of Tujunga, pleaded guilty in October to throwing chairs, shouting ethnic slurs and threatening to kill people at the restaurant on Nov. 4, 2020.
The attack came while “long-simmering tensions in Turkish and Armenian communities escalated” during the war between Armenia and Turkey-backed Azerbaijan, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a news release.
“Earlier that day, Stepanyan sent a text message saying that he planned to go ‘hunting for [T]urks.’ … Upon arriving at the restaurant, Stepanyan and Chalikyan stormed inside, threw hard wooden chairs at the victims, smashed glassware, destroyed a plexiglass barrier, and overturned tables. One of the defendants asked the victims, ‘Are you Turkish?’ and shouted, ‘We came to kill you! We will kill you!,'” the release said.
Given the motivations of Chalikyan and Stepanyan, they pleaded guilty to a charge of committing a hate crime, as well as a count of conspiracy, the DOJ said. Stepanyan was sentenced to five years in prison, while Chalikyan received a 15-month sentence.
They will also pay $21,200 in restitution for the attack, which hurt three people, including one who lost feeling in their legs and collapses multiple times as a result of the injury.
“Also, during the attack, Stepanyan ripped out the restaurant’s computer terminals and stole a victim’s iPhone,” totaling at least $20,000 in damage, the release said.
“These defendants were driven by hate, and their actions were deplorable,” United States Attorney Tracy L. Wilkison said in the release. “The physical injuries and emotional trauma to the victims cannot be understated. We hope that the sentences handed down today will help vindicate those harms.”
“The victims in this case were brutally attacked by the defendants who trampled their civil rights and likely caused lasting psychological pain for nothing more than the perception of where they were born,” added Kristi Johnson, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office, in the release. “The FBI is committed to investigating civil rights violations and holding accountable individuals who commit violent acts motivated by hate.”