A Murder's Long Shadow
A Decade Ago, Samuel Sheinbein Killed a Youth and Fled to Israel

By Katherine Shaver
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 29, 2007

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.

When Tello punched Needle during an argument in front of three young women, prosecutors said, Needle suddenly had a victim for his friend.

One week later, on Sept. 16, 1997, Sheinbein and Needle picked up Tello from his job at a Rockville fish store, prosecutors said. Three days later, a real estate agent noticed that the front door lock on a vacant house for sale in Aspen Hill had been tampered with. Inside, a stench led to the garage. Prosecutors said Tello had been strangled and beaten in the head with a shotgun. His limbs had been sawed off -- they have never been found -- and his torso had been burned.

Two days later, Sheinbein and Needle called their parents from New York, saying they were in trouble and needed money to go to Israel, prosecutors said. Sheinbein's parents and brother drove to Manhattan, picked up Samuel and drove him to John F. Kennedy International Airport with a plane ticket and a passport.

Needle's parents sent him money for an Amtrak ticket back to the Washington area, where he was arrested. Seven months later, he hanged himself with a bedsheet in his jail cell, two days before his trial was scheduled to begin. His parents, Roslyn and Sheldon Needle, who live in Rockville, declined to discuss their son or the case.

Samuel's father, Sol Sheinbein, who was disbarred as a Maryland patent lawyer in 2002, is living in Israel and working as an "adviser" at a patent law firm, according to its Web site. He declined a phone interview last week.

Montgomery police still have a 1998 arrest warrant for Sol Sheinbein, 63, on a charge of hindering or obstructing a police investigation. Because it is a misdemeanor, he can be arrested only if he voluntarily returns to the United States.

McCarthy, the Montgomery state's attorney, said the county also has an active warrant for Samuel Sheinbein filed with Interpol, the international police organization. If Samuel Sheinbein traveled to any of the 186 Interpol member countries, McCarthy said, he could be arrested and returned to the United States for trial. A constitutional protection against double jeopardy would not apply, McCarthy said, because Sheinbein has never been tried in the United States.

Still, McCarthy said, prosecuting the case in Maryland would be difficult after so many years, because witnesses have moved and perhaps died.

"Criminal cases don't get better with time," McCarthy said.

It took almost three years before Dawes, a bank teller, could empty her son's closets, but she, too, has moved forward. Two years after her son, known as Freddy, was killed, she married Eric Dawes, a banker whom Freddy had known well. She has two stepsons, who were 8 and 10 and close to Freddy when he was killed. They have grown up wary of strangers, she said.

Freddy's framed paintings and sketches line the basement walls, and photos of him can be seen around the house and on the dashboard of Dawes's car. She still bursts into tears when something reminds her of her son, and she still does a double-take when she spots another lanky, dark-haired teen.

What bothers her most, she said, is not knowing why her son became the target. She said she wonders how difficult it would be for Sheinbein to live wherever he wants -- and return to the United States -- under a false name.

After 10 years, she said, she thinks Sheinbein "ended up getting away with it" because of his far shorter prison sentence in Israel. As she stood in her living room, a few feet from her son's ashes and his framed high school portrait, her eyes filled with tears. No, she said after a long silence, she is not angry anymore.

"I don't think about it now," she said. "Why upset myself? There's a God. I tell myself: 'Leave everything to Him. He'll take care of everything.' "

Special correspondent Samuel Sockol in Jerusalem and staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.