An Assault Over Dogs in Brooklyn Calls Into Question Hate Crimes Criteria

Levi Kabakov, a 31-year-old Jewish father of two, is charged with assault for pushing Troy McLeod, who is Black, out of his wheelchair, video shows.

Troy McLeod’s stained yellow gloves kept his hands warm as he powered his wheelchair forward on a chilly afternoon in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. He was walking his muzzled dogs, passing by brownstones and parked cars under a cloudy sky. A man suddenly confronted him, yelling that he should not be walking his dogs without a leash.

The two men started arguing. A criminal complaint filed in the case indicates that the man beat McLeod, before pushing his wheelchair into a car. McLeod fell out of the chair and onto the sidewalk. “You’re wrong for what you’re doing!” cried McLeod, 56, in the video ​that was shared widely on social media before being reported by various local news outlets, including BK Reader and the New York Post.

The suspect, Levi Kabakov, 31, was arrested in March 2025 on 14 charges related to aggravated assault, and pleaded not guilty. Judge Sharen D. Hudson at Kings County Court in downtown Brooklyn extended an ongoing temporary order of protection to June 4, 2026. Kabakov is currently performing community service and taking anger management courses.

At a rally held in the neighborhood days after the incident, dozens of people called on Brooklyn’s District Attorney’s Office to add hate crime charges. 

McLeod is Black, Kabakov is Jewish, and Crown Heights has an extensive history of contentious relations between the local Black and Jewish communities, due in large part to the historical presence of the Chabad Lubavitch movement in the neighborhood. A Chabad movement flag blew in the wind outside of Kabakov’s home, which is where the assault took place.

McLeod was assaulted “because he was Black – he was Black and disabled,’’ said Kevin McCall, the lead pastor at Kingdom Justice Church, and the person who organized the rally in support of McLeod. “They wouldn’t have done that to no white man.”

Almost a year after the assault, McCall and dozens of other Black residents in Crown Heights are still demanding action. They have blasted police and prosecutors for failing to charge Kabakov with a hate crime in a case that has resurfaced racial tensions in a neighborhood where conflicts between Black and Jewish communities have flared into violence over the decades. 

At a December court date, the prosecution introduced a restorative justice track to find a resolution outside of court. Experts say interventions like mediations and community conversations can help address the harm without further criminalizing the culprit. The next court date is scheduled for late March.

Simcha Baez, the director of One Crown Heights – a local organization of Jewish, Black, and Caribbean-American residents who work on racial reconciliation in the neighborhood – said the tensions surrounding the case reflect the inherent challenges in moving beyond the community’s past.

Crown Heights is 55% Black and 20% of households in the area include at least one Jewish person, US Census data shows. The area is home to the world headquarters of Chabad Lubavitch, to which most Jewish residents belong, Baez said. A car accident that occurred during the 1990s involved the motorcade of a prominent rabbi killing a 7-year-old Black child. The accident resulted in a race riot, with some Black teenagers later killing a Jewish person. Baez, McCall, and others have been working together to try to ensure that the longstanding debate over the case does not ignite a new round of violence.

Black and Jewish Americans are already among the most common targets of hate crimes in New York City, with Jewish people accounting for 44 percent of victims and Black people accounting for 17 percent of victims in 2023, according to state statistics. Nationwide, over 50% of racially motivated hate crimes targeted Black people and 69% of religiously motivated incidents targeted Jewish people, according to statistics collated and published by the FBI.

“Both my Black ancestors and my Jewish ancestors were hunted to the ends of the earth,” said Tina Sacks, an associate professor at the University of California – Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare, whose mother is Black and father is Jewish.

Baez’s group, One Crown Heights, wants to foster more awareness and understanding among the two communities, but that is not always easy. 

“We live in a community with lots of different people and with lots of big history that really affects us and gets us really triggered on both sides,” said Baez, who is a member of the Chabad Lubavitch community.

Kabakov is seen interacting with McLeod during the March 2025 assault.

A shared history of persecution in the United States has often brought the two communities together. In the early 1890s, 60,000 Jewish people fled Russia to escape pogroms and arrived in the United States during a time when racial terror in the form of lynchings and race riots was common. Jewish refugees largely aligned themselves with Black leaders because they saw commonalities in being under attack, experts say.

This alliance was reinforced through the Holocaust in the 1930s and during the civil rights movement when leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel worked together. By the 1970s, however, that alliance had fractured “with the rise of the Nation of Islam,’’ said Charles Chavis, a history professor at George Mason University whose work focuses on the history of racial violence, civil rights activism and Black and Jewish relations in the South. “That fracture has colored the relationship and problematized the relationship to this day.”

In Crown Heights, the 1968 teachers’ strike in the nearby neighborhoods of Ocean Hill and Brownsville raised tensions. Most students in public schools in the area were Black and Puerto Rican at the time, but the majority of teachers and the teacher’s union were Jewish, said Marc Dollinger, a professor of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University and author of the book “Black Power, Jewish Politics: Reinventing the Alliance in the 1960s.” Black people and Jewish people found themselves at odds over “control of schools and control of curriculums,’’ Dollinger said.

The tensions flared into violence in 1991 when a motorcade carrying the leader of the Orthodox Jewish Chabad religious movement, Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, accidentally hit a Black boy, 7-year-old Gavin Cato. His death set off a cascade of events, including a group of Black teenagers killing Yankel Rosenbaum, an Orthodox Jewish graduate student visiting from Australia, which led to three days of riots and federal sentences for two of the teenagers involved. The driver who killed the boy was not prosecuted.

This history inevitably colored views among residents about what happened between McLeod and Kabakov in March. 

Kabakov is seen being detained by an NYPD officer after his assault of McLeod.

Before pushing McLeod, Kabakov hit him on the hands twice with a wooden bench and threw a wooden block at him, according to police records. In the video recorded by a passerby, Kabakov said that he did not want McLeod’s dogs around his kids. 

Kabakov later told police that he had attacked McLeod to protect himself from the dogs. But the video shows that the two German shepherds remained silent, muzzled and several feet behind McLeod during the assault. There are no children captured in the video.

McLeod has declined media requests. Cory Walker, a defense attorney representing Kabakov, declined to comment.

“We have historic tensions between two racialized communities. We’ve just had a violent act perpetrated by a white man against a Black man in a wheel chair,” said Dollinger.“That’s landing on me as a racial interaction, if not a racist one,” he said.

But prosecutors and legal experts say the available evidence does not support a hate crime charge.

In a statement to OffBeat Research, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office said, “There is no evidence in this case that the victim was targeted in whole or in substantial part because of a belief or perception regarding his race, color, disability […], which is required to sustain hate crime charges.”

Jason Goldman, a New York-based criminal defense attorney who has worked on hate crime cases, agreed. Making that determination without such evidence would “really open up the umbrella too far, further than the statute contemplates.” That’s why “an implied tension or some sort of history” is not enough, he said. 

McCall said this history still impacts present-day relations between Black and Jewish people in Crown Heights. He said counter-protestors showed up to the rally he had for McLeod in April attempting to pass out flyers that read “How would you like it if big dogs walked down the street in your neighborhood?” McLeod supporters – both Jewish and Black – confronted them until they left, McCall said.

“We’ve come a long way, but we still got some hills to climb,” he said. “It’s definitely headed into a peace direction, but anything can spark it to where it goes back. Anything.”

That’s why McCall, Baez, and others have been working together since April to lower tensions in the neighborhood, hosting community events with local rabbis and Black residents. Over the summer they hosted a dog walk to a local park, which they dubbed “Together We Wag.” 

Last June, One Crown Heights also partnered with NYC’s Office for the Prevention of Hate Crimes to throw a “Get To Meet Your Neighbour” carnival and magic show. The events have been well attended, they said.

While McCall said he still wants to see Kabakov prosecuted to “the fullest extent of the law” to deter others from committing such crimes, Dollinger, Sacks, and Chavis said restorative justice measures similar to the process Kabakov is engaging in are the best course of action. Dollinger and Sacks suggested that Kabakov should apologize to McLeod, and ask how to best remedy what happened.

Temporary orders of protection have prevented Kabakov from having any contact with McLeod. 

Colby Levin, the assistant district attorney on the case, said in court that her office is pushing to move the case out of court and to their restorative justice department because “tensions are so high” and “there needs to be that type of dialogue to get resolution.” Kabakov and McLeod having a supervised conversation are among the proposed restorative justice practices, she said. 

Baez said this incident and the way the community came together afterward could provide a blueprint for racial healing.

“You do not get this tension in all white neighborhoods because they’re not with Black people,” she said. “You do not get this tension in all Black neighborhoods because they’re not with Jewish people. Thank God we’re together. Our goal is the celebration of our diversity. It is wonderful that we get to have tensions because this is actually how we work things out in the world.”