Great Neck Man Sentenced After 'Offensively Touching' Passenger, 26, On Overnight Delta Flight: Court Records

NEW YORK, NY — A Great Neck man was sentenced to six months in prison on Monday for charges related to "offensively touching" a woman on a flight to Kennedy Airport, court records state.

On Dec. 9, 2024, Uriel Kaykov, 36, was charged with abusive sexual contact in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the U.S., and assault in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the U.S. related to the June 15, 2022, airplane assault, court records show. Three days before trial was to begin, Kaykov pleaded guilty to the second count, which is a misdemeanor, court records show.

Kaykov was sentenced on June 22 at the Theodore Roosevelt U.S. Courthouse in Brooklyn by Second Circuit Visiting Judge Denny Chin to six months in prison, which was the maximum sentence the judge could impose for the misdemeanor conviction, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

The incident happened on an overnight Delta Flight 2257 from Phoenix, Arizona, to John F. Kennedy International Airport, Molly Delaney, an assistant U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, said in a sentencing memorandum from Feb. 26. A 26-year-old woman was traveling home after a youth ministry retreat in Phoenix and was assigned the window seat, while Kaykov was assigned the aisle seat, but sat next to the woman in the middle seat, and his cousin sat in the aisle seat, Delaney said.

After the plane took off, the woman fell asleep and woke up to a "weird feeling" she could not identify, Delaney said. After the woman went to the bathroom, she returned to her seat and fell asleep again, this time, waking up to Kaykov's hand rubbing an intimate area on her body above her clothing, Delaney said.

The woman immediately got up and reported the incident to the flight attendance, who moved the woman to another seat and reported it to the pilots, Delaney said.

In the woman's victim impact statement from Feb. 26, in the court records, the woman shares how this incident has negatively altered her daily life, haunting her for years.

"For years, I have had regular nightmares reliving that moment. I wake up feeling panicked, as if it is happening all over again. Sleep, which should be a place of rest, has often become another place where I am forced to revisit the trauma. The exhaustion from that has affected every part of my life, my work, my relationships, my ability to feel fully present.

The hardest part is that something that lasted a relatively short time has changed me in ways that feel permanent. I no longer move through the world with the same sense of safety.

I think twice about situations I never used to question. I carry a vigilance that is heavy and constant... This experience has
taken from me a sense of trust in others, in my surroundings, and sometimes even in myself. I grieve the version of me that existed before that flight... The assault was not just a single act in time.

It has been years of anxiety, disrupted sleep, fear, and emotional pain. It has altered the way I experience the world. No one should have to carry this."

Delaney said that sexual assaults aboard airlines "have been steadily and alarmingly increasing for over a decade" in her memorandum, and asked Judge Denny Chin to sentence Kaykov to 3 to 6 months' in prison.

"Many flights occur under the same circumstances found here — late at night, aboard a dark cabin and miles from anyone who can be trusted to help," she said in the memorandum. "A serious penalty — an incarceratory sentence — is needed in this case so the public at large appreciates that similar conduct carries too high a price to risk replicating."