DUBLIN — A Hayward man has been sentenced to 12 years in state prison for stabbing his neighbor to death in July 2022 without an apparent motive.
Before he was formally sentenced, 27-year-old Chad Williams heard from the family of 67-year-old Hayward resident Thomas Boyd, who was out for a daily walk around his Amador Street neighborhood, when Williams attacked him. Williams was originally charged with murder but took a plea deal and a manslaughter conviction in December.
“You’ve devastated our family and uprooted us to the point where every time I have to come and look at your face, I never sleep the night before,” Boyd’s sister, Cheryl Taylor, said at the Dec. 20 sentencing hearing. “I toss and I turn because it’s a nightmare that I keep living over and over and over again. You stabbed my brother six times. He wasn’t bothering nobody.”
Williams was transferred to state prison in January, and is housed at the California Institution for Men in Chino, records show. He didn’t speak at his sentencing hearing, according to a transcript.
Boyd’s wife of 43 years, Paula Boyd, said at the hearing that her two sons still struggle every day with the loss, but after years of grieving she now doesn’t hate Williams, but “I feel bad for you as a person.”
“Every day I wake up, every single day I wake up with (Thomas Boyd) on my mind. Tears roll down my face. I wipe them away and try to have some kind of semblance of a normal life,” Paula Boyd said. “My heart is broken and I’ll never be the same.”
Police said at the time of the stabbing that Williams’ girlfriend told them Williams was having a “mental breakdown.” He and Boyd lived in the same Hayward apartment complex on the 24000 block of Amador Street but didn’t know each other, authorities said. Boyd was found stabbed to death near the complex’s swimming pool.
At the time, Williams was on probation for assault, though the underlying charges in the prior case involved allegations that he and three others sexually assaulted a group of teenagers at a get-together in Berkeley. Originally charged with oral copulation of minors in concert, the group was eventually allowed to plead no contest to assault charges in exchange for jail terms followed by probation.
In the sexual assault case, which was filed in 2018, Williams allegedly admitted that two girls, aged 15 and 16, had orally copulated him. The girls told police that one of the suspects took out a firearm and that the group proceeded to beat, rob and sexually assault the five teens inside a Berkeley apartment. Williams denied knowledge of a firearm at the scene.