A Murder's Long Shadow

A Decade Ago, Samuel Sheinbein Killed a Youth and Fled to Israel

Ten years have passed since Eliette Dawes learned that her only child was dead, his body torched and sawed into pieces by two Montgomery County teenagers who dumped his remains in an Aspen Hill garage.

Her son's urn, wrapped in white rosary beads, sits on her living room mantel. She sleeps every night with his pillow, flat after a decade, and his soft Charlotte Hornets T-shirt, which she has never washed.

"It has all my tears," she said quietly from a white sofa in her Silver Spring home.

If the slaying of Dawes's 19-year-old son, Alfredo Enrique Tello Jr., doesn't sound familiar, it could be because his death quickly became known by the name of one of his killers: Samuel Sheinbein. The case prompted an international furor when Sheinbein, then 17, fled to Israel with his father's help and avoided a murder prosecution in Maryland by successfully claiming Israeli citizenship and fighting extradition.

Ten years later, life has marched on for those involved in, and touched by, the case. Two teenagers are dead -- Sheinbein's co-defendant hanged himself in his Montgomery jail cell -- and parents are left to grieve and wonder why.

Sheinbein, 27, is housed in a maximum-security prison near the city of Ramla, said Yaron Zamir, spokesman for the Israel Prison Service. An Israeli court sentenced Sheinbein to 24 years after he pleaded guilty in 1999 to Tello's murder.

In Maryland, he would have faced a maximum sentence of life in prison with no possibility of parole. In Israel, he has had three 12-hour furloughs, which is customary for inmates who have served part of their sentence, Zamir said. Those hufshas (Hebrew for "vacations") will extend to 24 hours and then 48 hours as Sheinbein serves more time and continues good behavior, Zamir said. Sheinbein must post bail while out, but Zamir did not know whether he faces other restrictions.

Sheinbein, who has had no behavior problems in prison, is eligible for parole in six years, Zamir said. Montgomery State's Attorney John McCarthy, who helped prosecute the case, called that possibility "terrifying."

"Knowing what he did to this young man, that's a pretty frightening thought," McCarthy said, calling the slaying one of the most "horrific" of his 26-year career. "To commit that kind of crime, there has to be some kind of psychological or emotional component there that has to be addressed."

Dawes, petite and soft-spoken, said she had never heard of Sheinbein or Aaron Needle until they became suspects in her son's murder. It was Needle, then 17 and a Montgomery College student, who introduced Tello to Sheinbein, a friend from Needle's childhood, prosecutors said.

Tello, who had attended Springbrook High School, was remarkably outgoing -- "maybe too friendly," his mother recalled -- and made friends instantly. As a single parent, Dawes said, she took her son everywhere, making him so comfortable around adults that she thought of him as her "little man." She said he loved to joke around and blast music in the basement. But art, she said, was his real talent.

In summer 1997, Sheinbein, a rising senior at Kennedy High School, was looking for someone to kill as "practice," prosecutors said. He had bigger plans, to eventually kill the boyfriend of a girl he liked, they said. Sheinbein had carefully plotted it, down to a list of items he would need: metal restraints, rain suits, plastic bags and a knife, prosecutors said.