By John Dillon - Oct 12, 2012 2:08 PM ET
Charges against William Bryan Jennings, the former Morgan Stanley (MS) U.S. bond-underwriting chief accused of stabbing a New York cab driver over a fare, will be dropped, police said.
“I’m aware that the charges are being dropped,” Detective Chester Perkowski of the Darien, Connecticut, police department said today in an interview. He declined to comment further.
Jennings was accused of attacking the driver, Mohamed Ammar, on Dec. 22 with a 2 1/2-inch blade after a 40-mile (64 kilometer) ride from New York to the banker’s $3.4 million home in Darien. Ammar, a native of Egypt and a U.S. citizen, said Jennings told him, “I’m going to kill you. You should go back to your country,” according to a police report.
Jennings faced assault and hate-crime charges, each of which brings a maximum sentence of five years in prison. He was also charged with not paying the fare, a misdemeanor. He pleaded not guilty March 9.
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“Mr. Ammar is outraged by the prosecutor’s decision and continues to demand justice,” Ammar’s attorney, Hassan Ahmad of Ahmad Navqi Rodriguez LLP in New York, said in a statement. “He was anxiously awaiting trial this month and had no indication that the prosecutor would take such a drastic turn nearly a year after this crime was committed and within days of the trial.”
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Ammar told police that once they reached Jennings’s home, he refused to pay the $204 fare they had agreed on. He said he drove away to find police and that during the ride the banker stabbed him in the hand. Jennings said that they never agreed on an amount and that Ammar had demanded $294, which he viewed as exorbitant.
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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-1 ... e-say.html
