Two nurses at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, New York, were struck with a closed fist by a patient on the afternoon of Monday, Oct. 5, Nassau County police say — and that patient, 36-year-old Oshane Bernard of Oakland Gardens in Queens, is now charged with assault.
Police say Bernard became agitated while being treated at the hospital and struck both nurses, each 29, with a closed fist at around 3:30 p.m. Hospital staff evaluated both nurses at the scene. Officers took Bernard into custody without incident; police said he will be arraigned when “medically practical.”
Two counts of assault
Bernard is charged with two counts of second-degree assault, a felony under New York law that covers, among other things, injuring a nurse or other healthcare worker while they are performing their duties. Nassau County police have not released details of what, if anything, prompted Bernard to become agitated, and no attorney or plea has been publicly reported as of this writing. North Shore University Hospital, part of Northwell Health, has not issued a public statement on the incident.
Local outlets covering Nassau County courts and police, including Patch, Daily Voice, LongIsland.com and Long Island Life & Politics, each confirmed the charges and the hospital’s name through police accounts; none has reported a case update since the arrest.
An agitated patient hitting hospital staff isn’t rare, and that’s exactly the problem. I’ve had my own close calls on a unit where de-escalation training and a second set of hands weren’t always available when I needed them. What matters here is that Nassau County police treated the reported attack as a felony assault on healthcare workers, not just “part of the job” — and filed charges. That’s still the exception more often than it should be. Most hospitals I’ve worked haven’t had a clean, fast process for staff to actually press charges when a patient crosses the line from confused or scared into striking someone, and nurses get quietly discouraged from pursuing it. A nurse who gets hit at work deserves the same police response a stranger on the street would get.
What happens next
Bernard’s case will proceed through Nassau County’s court system once he is formally arraigned. He has not entered a plea, and under the law he is presumed innocent of the charges against him unless and until a court finds otherwise. If convicted on both felony counts, he could face a state prison sentence, though outcomes on assault charges vary widely by case and criminal history, and his history has not been publicly reported.
The case adds to a stretch of 2026 reporting this site has tracked on patients assaulting nurses and other hospital staff, from a New York hospital attacker indicted after a third assault in eleven weeks to an upstate New York nurse strangled with her own stethoscope. Each case is different, but the pattern of hospitals and prosecutors treating these incidents as prosecutable crimes, rather than routine workplace risk, is the part worth watching.