Judge John C. Rowley sentenced Green to 20 years in prison .

November 7, 2017

Man Convicted of Murder of I.C. Student Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison

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Nagee Green, the man convicted of murder in the stabbing death of an Ithaca College student at Cornell, was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Monday.

Judge John C. Rowley sentenced Green to three years for second-degree assault and 17 years to life for second-degree murder, which will run consecutively, Matthew Van Houten, the Tompkins County district attorney, told The Sun.

“He’ll have to do most of the 20 years” before potentially being released on parole, Van Houten said.

The father and sister of the victim, Anthony Nazaire, read emotional statements in court on Monday, and a prosecutor read a statement from Rahiem Williams, an Ithaca College student who was injured in the melee.

Anthony Nazaire’s father, Reginald Nazaire “said he would’ve loved to have 30 seconds in a room with the defendant, and then he thought, ‘What would Anthony do?’ and he wanted to do the better thing and be the better person, and he said he would be able to do that because of his son,” Van Houten said.

Eliza Filipowski, an assistant district attorney, read a statement from Williams to the court before sentencing.

“On Aug. 28, 2016, I was introduced to what true pain feels like,” Williams said in the statement, according to The Ithaca Voice. “Pain that is physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and very unbearable … This traumatic experience that I went through brought me and is still bringing me through a phase in life in which no other word can describe as purgatory.”

A jury found Green guilty of murder in September after a jury hung on the murder charge in the first trial in June. The jury in June found Green guilty of assault.

The two stabbings occurred on Cornell’s campus after a party hosted by Cornell fraternity Omega Psi Phi. In the early hours of Aug. 28, 2016, Cornell University Police found two men stabbed in the grass on the corner of College Avenue and Campus Road at around 1:57 a.m. after responding to a fight.

Nazaire was fatally stabbed in the chest and Williams was stabbed three times in the back.

The two Ithaca College students were taken to hospitals for treatment, and Nazaire was later pronounced dead at Cayuga Medical Center.

In an interview with The Sun in November 2016, Nazaire’s mother demanded a life sentence for Green. Katie Touissant, his mother, said she wanted Green to spend “life in jail because my son will never be able to see the sun shine.”

After the sentencing, Van Houten described the verdict as “bittersweet.”

“It’s painful,” he said. “It’s not satisfying in the sense that you can never bring Anthony back and this life that had so much promise and so much good. In that sense, you can never feel good, … but we feel that the verdicts were justice and that’s significant.”