For Ilya Shulman and his wife, the early morning gunpoint robbery at their Hastings-on-Hudson home two years ago shattered their sense of security. He said they are working every day to rebuild it but haven’t gotten there yet.
“My wife and I still talk about what happened and we likely always will,” Shulman said Thursday, May 21, in Westchester County Court before the sentencing of Brandon Scerri. “I can’t get over the fact that the defendant walked into our bedroom, saw our 7 month old daughter in her crib, saw a mother at her most vulnerable, heard the baby cry, and proceeded anyway. Nothing stopped him. Whatever he may say today or later about who he really is, that is what he really is.”
A jury convicted Scerri last month of charges including first-degree robbery and second-degree robbery for the May 11, 2024, home invasion at the Shulmans’ house on Hastings Landing. While saying he was sorry the Shulmans had been victimized, he insisted he had not committed the crime.
Westchester Judge George Fufidio was unmoved, sentencing the 31-year-old Scerri to 20 years in prison and ordering that the sentence would only start after Scerri completes a 12 1/2 year federal prison term for robbing banks in Pennsylvania and Ardsley.
“There’s not too much that could happen in someone’s life that could be worse than what you subjected those two people to,” Fufidio told Scerri.
Early on May 11, 2024, Scerri entered the house, made his way to their bedroom and woke them at gunpoint as their daughter slept in her crib. When the baby started to cry, Scerri touched her, before marching Shulman’s wife to the kitchen to get cash.
There, he tied them up before fleeing after he could not steal their car. In addition to the cash, he took Shulman’s wedding band, his wife’s Cartier and Tiffany bracelets and a gold necklace.
Scerri was arrested nearly 10 weeks later, along with his girlfriend, on the day he robbed a Chase bank in Ardsley. She was wearing the gold necklace taken in the home invasion. He was also linked to a pair of Pennsylvania bank robberies that spring. He pleaded guilty to federal charges in all three bank robberies and was sentenced earlier this year to the 12 1/2-year prison term.
Scerri was also convicted of possessing stolen jewelry in Yonkers when he tried to pawn the Cartier bracelet and for having the loaded gun when he robbed the Ardsley bank.
Assistant District Attorney James Bavero asked for the maximum 25-year prison term on the top burglary and robbery charges, citing the lasting scars the couple have from the “horrific” events of that early morning.
“This is their living nightmare,” Bavero said.
Defense lawyer David Channing cited the “cognitive and emotional challenges” Scerri faced in his upbringing and unsuccessfully urged Fufidio to order the state prison term run at the same time as his federal one.
Scerri, who is white, insisted he will be appealing the conviction and referenced the couple’s initial identification of the culprit as dark skinned and sounding like an African-American. He also criticized Bavero’s description of his girlfriend as “courageous” for her testimony at the trial. Scerri said her claim that he admitted to the home invasion was belied by her claim to Hastings police that she knew nothing about that crime and that her testimony was simply so that she could get a deal while facing charges in one of the Pennsylvania bank robberies.
Fufidio said those inconsistencies and the girlfriend’s deal were fully addressed by Channing during cross examination of the victims and the girlfriend during the trial.
Shulman said he and his wife were tough, growing up in Russia “in the chaos of the 1990s”, but that he “had never felt so violated, so powerless, so afraid for my family as I did that morning.”
He wondered what more might have happened had his 4-year-old son and 15-year-old daughter woken up and stumbled into the scene of their nearly naked parents bound on the kitchen floor. Or how long they may have remained there with their baby crying if his wife hadn’t managed to get out of her restraints.
“These are not hypotheticals I can just set aside,” Shulman told the judge. “I have had to wrestle with feelings of guilt and shame that as a parent I would have been powerless to protect my children in my own home.”
He asked simply for a sentence that would be “commensurate with what he chose to do to our family, our bodies and our minds, in the place where we were supposed to be most safe.”
This article originally appeared on Rockland/Westchester Journal News: Lengthy prison term for Hastings-on-Hudson home invasion
Reporting by Jonathan Bandler, Rockland/Westchester Journal News / Rockland/Westchester Journal News
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