A man has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison after pleading guilty to charges connected to beating an 86-year-old woman suffering from early-onset dementia for 42 minutes and then pushing her into an outdoor garbage bin in Dublin, Ireland. He said he thought that she was transgender and therefore was “a predatory pedophile,” repeating language often used by anti-transgender activists.

Alex Bailey, 30, said that he had taken so many drugs that night that he was in a state of “induced psychosis” and believed that the victim, Marie MacGowan, was a “man dressed up as a woman,” according to the Irish Times. She was actually trying to find her way home and was lost when she was attacked around 2 a.m.

CCTV footage shows that he spent over an hour harassing her and beating her sporadically over a period of 42 minutes. He knocked her to the ground during this time.

She got up and he pushed her head-first into a garbage bin. He tried to close the garbage bin’s lid on her, and it fell over. When she got out, Bailey punched her in the face and kicked her, police told the court.

“I really thought I was going to be dead,” MacGowan told the police later.

The horrifying attack only ended when three students who were walking by came to help her. CCTV footage shows Bailey talking to the students as they helped MacGowan, who was covered in blood and shaking, sitting on the curb.