Khalif Young sentenced to 25 years for accidentally slitting tourist’s throat

A deranged Manhattan man who slit the throat of a French tourist in a random Valentine’s Day ‘sneak attack’ in Harlem was sentenced Wednesday to 25 years in prison.

Khalif Young, 28, was found guilty of attempted murder last month in an unprovoked 2020 daytime assault on 27-year-old hiker Gabriel Baskow, who was injured while exiting the IHOP on Adam Clayton Boulevard with his girlfriend.

“Make no mistake, this defendant intended to kill,” Assistant District Attorney Erin Tierney said of Young in Manhattan Supreme Court on Wednesday. “The defendant made these guests in our city suffer what can be called a living nightmare.”

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Gregory Carro called the attack “unprovoked” and “brutal.”

“I can only imagine what kind of memories haunt the victim in this case and his soul mate,” the judge said. “Going through what is clearly an unprovoked vicious attack on him and essentially a sneak attack coming from behind.”

Carro asked Young if he had anything to say before passing judgment.

“No,” Yang replied. “God blessed.”

Baskow and his girlfriend Manon Duma were walking along Adam Clayton Jr. Boulevard near West 132nd Street around 11 a.m. on February 14, 2020, when Young ran up and hit him, according to police.

The shocking video shows Bascow in shock and bleeding on the sidewalk after being attacked as bystanders rushed to his aid and Yang fled the scene.

He was taken to a Harlem hospital and remained in intensive care for 10 days before being flown back to France with the help of a medical team, prosecutors said.

Young was captured a few days later when a vigilant police officer spotted the fugitive.

“The defendant never once thought about the suffering that Mr. Bascu endured,” Tierney told the judge on Wednesday. “He just didn’t care, and he showed it when he casually ran away from the crime scene.”

According to the prosecutor, the ferocious demon looked more like someone who missed a train than someone who left another person to die on the street for no reason.

Young’s lawyer, Norman Bock, told the judge that “the defendant continues to deny his guilt and plans to appeal.”

In a statement, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg called the attack “shameless.”

“Everyone deserves to walk the streets of New York safely, and I appreciate the tremendous strength of this victim who recovered from this attack and returned to Manhattan to testify,” Bragg said.

The convicted slasher lived about two blocks from a pancake restaurant and had accidentally attacked at least two others in the past, police sources told The Post at the time.

Sources said that on October 20 last year, he rang his neighbor’s doorbell, punched the woman in the face and kicked her several times.

Police sources said that four months earlier, in June, he entered a deli on West 135th Street and punched a deli worker in the neck.

Prior to these two incidents, Young was arrested in March 2015 for illegal possession of a loaded firearm and spent just under two years in an upstate jail.

He was released on parole in April 2017.