Groping a woman during flight to JFK lands Long Island man in federal prison

A Great Neck man who groped a sleeping woman on a flight to New York received a six-month prison sentence on Monday — after a federal judge said the crime demanded the strongest punishment available.

The victim, identified by authorities as “Kelly” was 26, exhausted after a youth ministry retreat in Phoenix, and fast asleep in her window seat on a Delta flight home to JFK International Airport four years ago when she woke to something wrong.

She didn’t know what it was at first, reporting only later that she had a strange feeling, prosecutors said. She stood up, walked to the restroom, returned to her seat and fell back asleep.

Then Kelly felt it — a hand rubbing her groin area over her clothing.

The man responsible, Uriel Kaykov, 36, of Great Neck, had switched seats with his cousin to sit next to her after boarding, authorities said. A law enforcement source told Greater Long Island that Kaykov works as a jeweler in the Diamond District.

Visiting U.S. Second Circuit Judge Denny Chin sentenced Kaykov, who pleaded guilty in August to abusive sexual conduct on an airplane, to six months in federal prison.

The term is the maximum allowed under his Class B misdemeanor conviction for assault in the special aircraft jurisdiction of the United States.

The assault happened June 15, 2022, aboard Delta Flight 2257, an overnight red-eye from Phoenix to New York.

When Kelly woke and realized she was being assaulted, she immediately flagged a flight attendant. Her belongings were gathered, she was moved to another seat, and the crew notified the pilots.

In a victim impact statement submitted to the court, Kelly described the years of trauma that have followed.

“For years, I have had regular nightmares reliving that moment,” she wrote. “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.”

She said the assault has changed her.

“I no longer move through the world with the same sense of safety,” Kelly wrote. “I think twice about situations I never used to question.

“I carry a vigilance that is heavy and constant,” she continued. “I grieve the version of me that existed before that flight.”

Prosecutors had asked Chin to impose the maximum sentence, citing the harm done to Kelly, as well as a broader crisis of sexual assault on commercial flights.

The FBI investigated more than 150 cases of passengers sexually assaulting other passengers in 2025, according to the government’s sentencing submission in this case.

“Millions of strangers are crammed daily into commercial flights,” prosecutors wrote. “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.”

The government noted that Kaykov “took advantage of a vulnerable person, and one who was in no position to provide consent for what was occurring.”

Kelly ended her victim impact statement with a simple declaration: “No one should have to carry this.”

Kaykov has two prior arrests, both from 2012. One involved a driving while impaired charge in Queens, which was resolved with a fine and license suspension. The other involved marijuana possession at the U.S.-Mexico border; that charge has no recorded disposition.

_{Top: Photo by DAL Gucci.}