Alexander waives preliminary hearing

NEW GARDEN » The Avon Grove School District administrator charged with an alleged domestic assault against his wife at their home waived his preliminary hearing Monday after the prosecution withdrew the most serious of the counts against him.

Thomas M. Alexander, the former principal at Avon Grove High School who took over as director of educational services in the district administrative office in 2015, remains free on $50,000 cash bail after agreeing to forego the preliminary hearing before Senior Magisterial District Judge Charles G. Nistico.

Assistant District Attorney Alexis Shaw told Nistico that her office was withdrawing felony charges of aggravated assault and misdemeanor charges of un-

lawful restraint. However, she said the amended complaint would add a count of strangulation and one of false imprisonment, both misdemeanors. There is also a summary charge of harassment.

Alexander declined comment following the hearing.

The 49-year-old was arrested and charged in July after his wife, Ellen Alexander, told them he had pulled her out of bed, punched her while holding a pillow over her face, slapped her, kicked her, punched her in the stomach, and dragged her from her bedroom. Asked by the arresting officer if she was afraid for her life during the incident, Ellen Alexander said that she had been.

Ellen Alexander did not appear in the courtroom at the scheduled preliminary hearing Monday; Birmingham Officer John Freas was prepared to testify for the prosecution. But Alexander, accompanied by his attorney, John E.D. Larkin of the West Chester firm of Gawthrop Greenwood, decided to waive his right to a hearing and have his case transferred to Common Pleas Court.

Such decisions are often signals that the defendant hopes to be able to resolve the case against him through a non-trial disposition, pleading guilty to certain charges in exchange for an agreed-upon sentence. However, defendants do not give up their right to a trial and to challenge the evidence against them in court by doing so.

Asked for comment, Larkin pointed to testimony that the Alexanders gave at a hearing on Ellen Alexander’s request for a Protection From Abuse (PFA) order in August, at which Thomas Alexander said that his wife was belligerent and intoxicated when the alleged assault occurred, and suggested that the injuries that Freas saw when she complained had been sustained in a previous boating accident.

Ellen Alexander was awarded an emergency Protection From Abuse (PFA) order in July following the incident. On Aug. 21, Common Pleas Senior Judge Ronald Nagle extended the provisions of that order for at least five months, or until the criminal case is resolved, after both sides agreed to the extension.

Under the terms of the protective order, Alexander is forbidden from having any contact with his wife, or threatening or stalking her. He is also prohibited from going to their home in Birmingham.

According to a criminal complaint filed in the case by Freas, he was dispatched to the emergency room at Paoli Hospital on July 13 to interview Ellen Alexander about her allegations of a domestic assault.

There, he noticed that she had bruises around her eyes and on her wrists. When he asked what had happened, she told him that she had been in bed about 11 p.m. the night before, July 12, when Alexander came in the room, grabbed her by the hair and ears, and pulled her from the bed onto the floor.

Alexander then allegedly proceeded to stomp on her with his feet, kicking and hitting her. He pulled a pillow from the bed and put it over her face, then punched the pillow “as hard as he could.” He continued to hit her while she was in a fetal position, and put the pillow on her stomach and punched it again.

He then dragged her from the bedroom and locked her out. She went to sleep in another bedroom in the house.

Freas wrote that he asked Ellen Alexander if at any time she feared for her life. “She said yes. When the pillow was over her face it was hard to breathe,” the complaint states.

In her statement of what happened in the application for a PFA on July 14, Ellen Alexander said essentially the same thing. However, she said that when she went to a spare bedroom after the initial attack, Alexander continued to strike her. When she pretended to pass out, she wrote, he grabbed her, flipped her over, and continued to hit her with his hands.

“I kept saying, ‘You are going to kill me,’“she wrote in the narrative. “I wish I could,” she quoted Alexander as saying.

Ellen Alexander said that Alexander continued the assault the following morning as he was going to work. When she left the house to go to Paoli hospital, she told him on the phone when she was going and why. “He denied doing anything to me,” she wrote.

In his testimony about the incident at the hearing before Nagle, Thomas Alexander said that his wife had been in her bedroom after drinking heavily during an outing at Longwood Gardens. When he confronted her about sending texts to other men and tried to take her phone from her, she grew angry and threw a ceramic heater at him. He said he did not assault her, and that she went to bed by herself in another bedroom.

Both he and the couple’s daughter, Taylor Alexander, suggested during the proceeding that the bruises that Ellen Alexander exhibited in the hospital on July 13 had come from earlier incidents and not from any assault. They said she had been injured when she fell off a boat the family owns in Delaware. But Taylor Alexander acknowledged under questioning by Megan Stumpf, representing Ellen Alexander, that she was not present in the couple’s Birmingham home at the time of the alleged assault.

Stumpf, a staff attorney with the Chester County Domestic Violence Center, did not comment on the matter.

As educational services director in Avon Grove, Alexander is responsible for providing administrative support in a variety of programs and services, including human resources, student services, community relations, and transportation. He has no direct contact with students at the 6,000-plus enrollment district.

In August, Avon Grove Superintendent Christopher Marchese said the district was aware of the charges against Alexander but would not comment on them directly since they were not associated with his work in the district.