Irvington Metro North Station Stabber Sentenced

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March 2, 2016

by Barrett Seaman

It was during the evening rush hour on April 8 last year when Irvington Fire Chief Chris DePaoli spotted a man assaulting a woman alongside the Irvington train station. Using his daughter’s baseball bat, DePaoli intervened, though the assailant, later identified as Sidney Brown of Mount Vernon, was in the process of stabbing Deborah Henry, 36, of Yonkers, numerous times. Police arrived soon after to subdue Brown, but it was the chief’s intervention that almost certainly saved Henry’s life, according to Westchester District Attorney Janet De Fiore.

On February 4, Brown, 52, pleaded guilty to felony charges of attempted murder and was sentenced to 19 years in prison. That pleases DePaoli, who testified before a grand jury in Brown’s indictment.

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“He deserves every year they gave him,” he said, adding, “If they’d given him more, I’d have been happy with that.”

In the immediate aftermath of the incident, DePaoli was honored on several occasions and received considerable local media coverage, which he dismisses as “overblown… Any firefighter in America would have done the same thing.”

Asked if he had any news of the victim, Henry, once Brown’s domestic partner, who was stabbed repeatedly in the chest, neck and thigh, DePaoli said he had seen her briefly during the grand jury proceedings.

“She looked surprisingly good,” he said.

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