Home invasion ordeal detailed

Delco teen held on charges he stuffed woman, 72, in closet

The daughterin-law of a 72-year-old East Brandywine woman who was bound and gagged and locked in a closet for four days testified Thursday during a preliminary hearing for the Delaware County teenager accused of the crime that she had searched the home for the woman to no avail after not hearing from her during that time, before something caused her to call out her name.

“I’m here,” she heard the elderly woman respond from somewhere in the two-story, 100-yearold stone home along the Brandywine Creek where she lived alone. “Where are you?” the younger woman cried. “I’m on the floor,” came the response.

The daughter-in-law was able to track her relative’s voice down-

stairs to a small closet that had been sealed shut by a screw stuck in the lock. When she forced open the door, she found her motherin-law lying on the dirt floor, her hands bound behind her back and legs tied together with duct tape.

The woman detailed the ordeal suffered by her mother-in-law on the stand before Common Pleas Judge John Hall at the start of the three-hour-long preliminary hearing in the case of the 17-year-old teen.

On her head was duct taped a reusable cloth grocery bag. She had been without food or water for four days.

At the conclusion of the hearing, Judge Hall ordered the teen held on charges of attempted homicide, robbery, burglary, aggravated assault, strangulation, and related counts. The juvenile, whose name is being withheld by the Daily Local News, as are the identities of the victim and her daughter-in-law, was returned to the Chester County Youth Center at the conclusion of the hearing at the county Justice Center.

In addition to the attack on the woman, the teen is believed to have stolen credit cards, a laptop computer, cell home and the victim’s car, a Fiat 500. Dressed in a charcoal gray suit and a royal blue dress shirt but in shackles, the teen did not testify during the proceeding, and made no statement to the court.

The hearing was the first step in the prosecution’s attempt to have the teen certified as an adult and tried in criminal court, rather than dealt with in the Juvenile Court system. The next step is for the District Attorney’s Office to convince judge that the best interests of the community at large would be for the teen’s case to be transferred.

The victim did not appear at the proceeding, although members of her family and friends lined the courtroom seats. She has been in recovery since she was discovered at her home Feb. 26. She still has wounds suffered from being bound and left on the hard floor that must be attended to on an almost daily basis, her daughterin-law testified. She has not returned to her East Brandywine home to live since the incident.

The daughter-in-law told Judge Hall that the week the woman disappeared, she and her husband had been worried for some days about not hearing from the elderly woman either by phone or text. A drive-by check on Feb. 25 found her car gone from the driveway. The next day, a Sunday, the daughter-in-law drove over and began looking inside the house for signs that her mother-in-law was all right. Instead she found her in the closet.

”I was shocked,” the woman said under questioning from Assistant District Attorney Christine Abatemarco, who is prosecuting the case. “I realized that someone had put her in that closet and didn’t want her to come out. I said, ‘Who did this?’”

East Brandywine Detective Daniel Orris, the lead investigator in the case, testified that the victim was able to give only a cursory description of her attacker, who she said had grabbed her from behind when she had returned home around 7:30 p.m. Feb. 22 as she returned home from work. She had earlier noticed evidence of a break-in at the home in a secluded part of the township along Route 282.

“She said he was very quick with the duct tape,” he used to bind her, Orris said. “In her words, he seemed very familiar with the process of binding someone.”

In an interview at Paoli Hospital following the robbery, the woman was able to give a general guess at her attacker’s height, and said she was able to see his skin color. But she was not able to determine whether he had an accent, since virtually all he said to her was, “You’ll be with Jesus soon.”

Orris testified that his department was able to tie the robbery case together with a recent walkaway from the nearby Devereux-Brandywine campus in Wallace, where the teen had been sent following an adjudication for residential burglaries in Delaware County, where he lived. A check there showed that the walk-away had left the facility Feb. 21 or so, and returned on Feb. 24. His sneakers, soaked in bleach, were confiscated, an aide said, as was his clothing, and he was sent back to the Lima Detention Center in Delaware County.

The soles of the sneakers matched shoe prints that had been found by East Brandywine officers who had responded to the call initially, Orris said.

Others testifying about the teen’s connection to the incident included Chester County Detective Keith Cowdright, who said he viewed a video from a surveillance camera at a 7-Eleven store outside Baltimore, Md., where the victim’s credit cards had been used. On it, he saw a person who he identified as the teen getting in and out of a Fiat 500 with a Pennsylvania license plate that turned out to be the woman’s car.

County Detective Ben Martin also testified that fingerprints matching the teen’s had been found on pieces of the duct tape that was used in the attack, as well as on the woman’s cell phone, which was recovered outside the dormitory in which teen stayed at Devereux.

For his part, defense attorney Michael Raffaele questioned witnesses about the teen’s behavior at Devereux, and in custody, and whether he had shown aggressiveness or violence during those periods. At the end of the hearing, he argued that Abatemarco had not prove a case that the teen intended to kill the woman, and asked the judge to dismiss the charge of attempted murder. Hall did not.

Neither attorney commented after the hearing concluded.

According to county juvenile probation officials, the teen, a resident of Media and native of Thailand, was adjudicated delinquent on two burglary counts in Delaware County Oct. 18. He was ordered supervised in a residential program supervised by Glen Mills School and placed on the Delaware County GPS system, but fled from those programs Oct. 30. He was taken into custody by Delaware State Police after he was spotted walking down I-95 near the Delaware-Maryland border. Police said he was found with drug paraphernalia in his possession, as well as items from a previous burglary.

He underwent six evaluations while at the Delaware County Juvenile Detention Center in Lima, and was ordered to a residential treatment center. On Dec. 12, he was sent to Devereux’s campus off Route 282 in Wallace.