Plea resolves Main Line handcuffing court case

WEST CHESTER >> Expressing some reluctance at being asked to do so, a Chester County Court judge on Tuesday accepted a probationary sentence agreement for a former Main Line man accused of handcuffing and suffocating his then-girlfriend in their bedroom more than two years ago.

But for the agreement of the victim in the case, said Common Pleas Court Judge Patrick Carmody to defendant David Bookstaber, “I might have rejected this plea, frankly.

“I think what you did was

harmful, but I don’t think you thought that you did anything wrong,” Carmody said as Bookstaber listened over a video conference call from his home in Idaho. “I think you did it because she was irritating you,” not that he was protecting her from hurting herself during an emotional melt-down the night of the incident.

Bookstaber had admitted at his trial in November — which ended with a hung jury and a set of acquittals — that he and his girlfriend, Alicia Rosato, had been drinking that night and began quarreling. When he thought she would hurt herself because of her highly agitated state, complicated by a mixture of alcohol and prescription drugs, he said he put a set of handcuffs he had in the house on her wrists and sat atop her for several hours while the two were unclothed. She eventually was able to convince him to free her and called Tredyffrin police.

“I find it appalling to handcuff anyone,” Carmody said, noting that had he been found guilty at the trial he had considered ordering Bookstaber held in handcuffs for five hours. “I just found that what you did was very inappropriate.”

The judge said he accepted the resolution to the case because Rosato had agreed to forgo a retrial on the remaining charges involving the handcuffing incident — unlawful restraint, false imprisonment, and simple assault. Bookstaber was found not guilty of felony strangulation and another count of simple assault.

As part of the resolution to the case worked out between the prosecution and Bookstaber’s defense attorney, he pleaded guilty to a summary charge of disorderly conduct and was placed on non-reporting probation for 90 days. He was also ordered to have no contact with Rosato, with whom he had restarted a relationship after the incident in December 2018, which ended in late 2019.

Bookstaber, after answering Carmody’s questions about his decision to enter the guilty plea with terse yes or no response, did not address the underlying accusations in the case, or the facts that the prosecution put on the record — that he created a “hazardous or physically offensive condition which serves no legitimate purpose” — except to say he agreed with them.

Assistant District Attorney Kaitlyn Macauley, who had prosecuted the case with Assistant District Attorney Michelle Thurstlic-O’Neill, told Carmody that she had spoken with both Rosato and the police involved in the case, and had discussed the “pros and cons” of retrying the case. They agreed that rather than going back in front of a jury, a proper resolution could come through a summary plea from Bookstaber. Rosato, she told the judge, had approved the plea arrangement.

Carmody acknowledged that a retrial might have ended again with a second hung jury, as the panel wrestled with questions about Bookstaber’s intent the night of the quarrel and Rosato’s inconsistent and changing statements as to whether Bookstaber was trying to help or harm her.

“That has been beaten around for two years,” Carmody said with a sigh. “I just want the two of them to go their separate ways.”

Also involved in the proceeding was the decision by the prosecution to drop charges of hindering apprehension and destroying evidence and intimidation of victims and witnesses, tied to accusations by Rosato that Bookstaber pressured her into recanting her original complaints and maneuvering to get the charges against him dropped. Carmody noted that he thought that a “weak” case primarily because of Rosato’s inconsistencies, and text messages between the two that showed them essentially collaborating on what she might say to authorities.

Bookstaber’s attorney, Joseph P. Green Jr. of West Chester, said after the proceeding the matter had eaten up far too much time and effort over the past two years.

“The expenditure of resources over the years of this unfortunate debacle is really difficult to understand,” Green said as he left the courtroom. “The amount of energy expended on the allegations of obstruction in particular was discouraging.”

The case — essentially accusations of domestic violence that, while serious, might not otherwise have created much of a ripple in the Chester County legal world — drew attention because of the connection the defendant has to another, yet unresolved, crime.

A Yale graduate and former marksman with the U.S. Air Force, Bookstaber has been identified in court documents as a “person of interest” in a homicide investigation involving a 62-year-old widow, Denise Barger, who was found dead in her Tredyffrin home in June 2016. She lived alone, in a house next to where Bookstaber and his family lived at the time.

In a search warrant issued by Chester County Detectives at the time, police said they found a trail of blood from Barger’s bedroom on the second floor of her home, down a set of stairs, out a rear door, and across a yard towards Bookstaber’s home on Heatherstone Drive. He has not been charged with any crime in the case, which is still under investigation.

Bookstaber, 44, had had confrontations with Barger in the months leading up to her death, partially over her complaints about gunfire coming from the woods behind his house.

Green addressed that matter on Tuesday by defending Bookstaber against any notion that he was involved in Barger’s death.

“He is innocent of that,” Green said. “He hasn’t been charged with that and the reason he hasn’t been charged is that there is insufficient evidence to show that he did anything.”

Bookstaber was arrested on Dec. 5, 2018, after Rosato called Tredyffrin police to say he had handcuffed her when she began berating him for neglecting him on their “date night,” restrained her on a bed for about six hours at his home on West Golf Club Lane, and held a pillow over her mouth causing her twice to pass out.

At his trial, the two sides presented their conflicting versions of the events that occurred the night of the handcuffing, but also argued over Rosato’s credibility, which the defense said was so conflicted that the jury could not believe her testimony about what happened that night.

Green presented Rosato with multiple instances in which she lied to police and told friends that she was intending to file a lawsuit against Bookstaber to get money from him.

Green maintained that Bookstaber was justified in handcuffing and restraining Rosato the night of the incident in order to protect himself from her assaults — he sustained a bite on the back of his neck during the confrontation — but also to keep her from hurting herself.

But Thurstlic-O’Neill said the defense was attempting to take the focus off Bookstaber’s own behavior, which he acknowledged in police interviews, and to blame Rosato, who was the “perfect victim” of his violence.

“We didn’t choose Alicia to be the victim in this case,” Thurstlic-O’Neill said. “Mr. Bookstaber did. She was weak, able to be manipulated, and if all else failed he would be able to make her look crazy. This case is about Mr. Bookstaber’s conduct, not hers.”