BROOKLYN — Two men — including one with lengthy rap sheet — were released by a judge a day after being charged with a hate crime for attacking and hurling a string of racial slurs at a couple on a Sheepshead Bay street, authorities said.
Rudolph Evmenenko, 27, and Bernard Szurant, 25, encountered the interracial couple at the corner of East 17th Street and Avenue R about 5:45 a.m. Saturday before peppering them with a litany of epithets and threats, police and prosecutors said.
"You punk motherf---er. You punk ass n---a," they shouted as they pressed their fists into their palms while the couple walked past, according to a criminal complaint.
"This is our neighborhood, you f---ing n----r. Get out of here. [...] Go back to your neighborhood. We're going to lynch you, you f---ing charcoal burner," they continued.
Szurant — who has been arrested 20 times, including for choking someone — and Evmenenko then started punching the 42-year-old boyfriend, who is black, striking him in the head, officials said.
The victim's 38-year-old girlfriend, who is white, then took out her phone to call 911, but Evmenenko knocked it out her hands, prosecutors said.
Police arrested the pair at the scene, but that didn't stop Szurant from continuing to spew slurs at an officer, prosecutors said.
"I know you. I know where you work. I'm going to come to the 61st Precinct and f---ing kill you, you f---ing n---a, you p---y n---a. I hate n---as," Szurant told Det. Leonard Craig, the complaint said.
Szurant and Evmenenko were charged with assault as a hate crime, criminal mischief, harassment and menacing, records show.
The next, they appeared before Judge Loren Baily-Schiffman, who drew controversy for releasing a man who grabbed at an officer's gun days inside a Bushwick police station after another NYPD officer was murdered in The Bronx, records show.
Prosecutors asked for each to be held on $50,000 bail, but the judge released them.
Baily-Schiffman let the pair walk the same day she released Kurdel Emmanuel, who strolled into the 83rd Precinct stationhouse and tried to grab a gun from an officer's belt.
The judge, who was elected to civil court in 1999 and promoted to Supreme Court judge in 2009, did not immediately return a request for comment.
Baily-Schiffman normally hears civil cases but handles weekend arraignments about two to three times a year, said a spokesman for the Office of Court Administration.
"The judge made her decision based on the facts and circumstances of the case as she saw them," OCA spokesman Lucian Chalfen said.
"Any judge does have the ability to go with what either the prosecution or defense asks for — or set an amount that he or she feels appropriate," Chalfen added.
Judges can't set bail as a punishment and are required to weigh whether or not the defendant will likely flee and skip a court date, according to state law.
Szurant and Evmenenko are due back in court on Sept. 13 for the attack on the couple, and Szurant is also scheduled to appear that day for threatening the detective, records show.
Szurant has been arrested 20 times, though most police records for those crimes are sealed, an NYPD spokesman said.
He was arrested in July 2010 for robbery, in September 2014 for grand larceny and robbery, and again in May 2015, the spokesman said. One of his arrests stemmed from choking someone, though details of the incident weren't available, police said.
Evemenenko was arrested in July 2016 for marijuana possession on Coney Island, records show.
Neither of their lawyers immediately responded to requests for comment.
