A Texas man was sentenced to 25 years in prison on hate crime charges after attacking an Asian family, including punching and cutting a father and slashing his 6-year-old child.  

On March 14, 2020, Jose Gomez III, 21, entered a Sam’s Club location in Midland, Texas, behind an “Asian family with young children,” the Department of Justice said in a Thursday news release. 

Gomez believed the family was Chinese and “blamed them for the COVID-19 pandemic,” the department said. Gomez in February pleaded guilty to three counts of committing a hate crime.   

After entering the store, he found a serrated steak knife, “bent the blade so that when he held the handle in his fist, the blade rested against his knuckles, sharp-edge facing outward,” and punched the father in the family, the department confirmed. Gomez cut the father’s face.  

He then retrieved another knife from the store and targeted the man’s young children. Gomez “slashed open the face” of the 6-year-old child, and “the blade entered millimeters from [the child’s] right eye, split his right ear, and wrapped around to the back of his skull,” the department said. 

Gomez also stabbed an employee at the store who tried to intervene. During the incident, Gomez yelled to the Asian family to “Get out of America.”

Officials said Gomez admitted that he attacked the employee, who is white, because he “wanted to kill the six-year-old child and [the employee] was preventing him from doing so,” the department said in the Thursday press release.  

West Virginia:Man who threatened to kill Dr. Anthony Fauci in emails sentenced to 3 years in prison

Alabama:A captive girl escaped a home. Then, police found two bodies