1 Brother Convicted, 1 Acquitted in Shomrim Trial
One brother was convicted and the other was exonerated Thursday in the 2010 beating of a black teenager they encountered while patrolling as watch volunteers in their Orthodox Jewish neighborhood.
Judge Pamela White ruled from the bench against Eliyahu and Avi Werdesheim, 24 and 22. They opted for a bench trial after withdrawing a motion to move their trial because of publicity comparing their case to the fatal shooting of black Florida teen Trayvon Martin.
Both were charged with false imprisonment, second-degree assault and carrying a deadly weapon with intent to injure. The judge found Eliyahu not guilty of the weapon charge and cleared Avi on all three.
They had no visible reaction when the verdict was read, though Eliyahu’s wife ran from the courtroom in tears. They could have faced up to 13 years if convicted on all three charges.
Prosecutors said the brothers attacked the teen, hitting him with a radio and holding him on the ground. But Eliyahu testified that he acted in self-defense when the teen attacked him with a nail-studded plank and said his brother wasn’t involved in the fight. The judge rejected Eliyahu’s claim of self-defense.
Assistant State’s Attorney Kevin Wiggins told the judge the then-15-year-old boy lived in the neighborhood with his grandmother. He was walking to the bus stop in 2010 to meet his mother for a doctor’s appointment when he noticed two men in a red sports coupe watching him.
When one of the men told the teen that he didn’t belong in the neighborhood, he felt scared and armed himself with a board. The car left, but when it came back, the teen threw down the stick as the men got out and confronted him.
The prosecutor said Eliyahu grabbed him and Avi hit him in the head, creating a wound that required two staples. Once a third person arrived on the scene, stepping on the teen’s hand when he reached for the phone in his pocket, the Werdesheims left.
Wiggins struggled to get the now 16-year-old teen to speak on the witness stand about the incident. The emotional teen’s words were inaudible and he frequently put his head down in his lap. Finally, he stood, declaring that he shouldn’t have called police and he wouldn’t testify anymore. The teen was excused and his testimony stricken from the record, but his 911 call recording was allowed.
Sgt. John Jackson, the Baltimore police district’s patrol supervisor at the time, testified that he found the teen upset, bleeding from a gash on the back of his head and disheveled with leaves and dirt on his clothes. Jackson quickly became frustrated with members of the Shomrim of Baltimore watch group, because he believed they were not being truthful. Though he asked them to have the two men involved in the incident return to the scene, the men did not come back, he said.
After days of conflicting accounts from several witnesses for the state and defense, including Shomrim members, Eliyahu took the stand Wednesday and shared his own version of events, explaining that he acted in self-defense. He testified that he was headed home around midday that Friday with his brother, Avi, when he responded to a suspicious person report he heard on the Shomrim radio. He found the teen looking into windows of homes and trying the door of an SUV, he said.
Once the teen saw him, Eliyahu said he got out to explain that he was with the neighborhood watch and was keeping an eye on him because he had seen the teen walking in people’s yards. Avi, who was not a Shomrim member, told the teen he belonged in school, but the teen replied that he didn’t have school and seemed upset, he said. The teen turned away and pulled a plank from a nearby wooden pallet, carrying it with him.
Eliyahu testified that he worried that the situation could get bad and he decided to draw on de-escalation skills he learned in the Israeli military, hoping to reassure the agitated teen that he was just a neighborhood watch member.
But when he got out of the car and began to speak, Werdesheim testified the teen sprinted at him, raising the nail-studded board. He said he couldn’t run or get back in his car, so he deflected the board with his left arm and hit the teen in the head with his right hand, which still held his radio. The teen hit the ground. He and attorney Andrew Alperstein re-enacted the exchange for the judge using a replica board.
Other Shomrim members ran up and one told the brothers to leave, so they did, he said.
The trial drew spectators from the area’s Jewish community and black community activists to the small courtroom. Several speakers at a recent rally noted similarities with the Trayvon Martin case: Both involved black teens who were approached by neighborhood watch volunteers who felt they looked suspicious or didn’t belong in the neighborhood.
this is why you dont pick a judge
please, there was no real testimony and kid himself asked for the charges to be dropped. this is one big joke and show for the black people
oh now the family will try and sue for 6 million.
Avi L.
It’s almost simple, no one wins !
That’s a reasons there are sports with rules !
No one should get hurt either !
Generalzations are a sign of ignorance !
Life isn’t a game !
Ma Rabbi
This is terrible. Now people will be afraid to join Shomrim and those already there will be afraid to touch black criminals.
We must pray for Eliyahu that he is exonnerated. At the very least that he receive a suspended sentence.
Are there any readers from Baltimore who know this Judge?
huh?
for black people? what is that supposed to mean?
Mama T
Don’t know the judge but the local papers (not frum) have been blatantly anit_semitic. No surprise there
SUE
IT MEANS THAT THE BLACK PEOPLE RULE EVERYTHING . PEOPLE AND JUDGES ,POLICE ARE AFRAID TO RULE THE TRUTH BECAUSE THE BLACK MAN WILL COME AND KILL THEM . THE JEW OF COURSE WON’T. THE BLACK MAN GETS AWAY WITH MURDER. [LITERALLY]
Jewish dude
No problem always appeal the verdict if needed to the supreme court. Hope on appeal Eliyahu get set free.
Anon
The bigotry is disgusting as is the hypocritical victim mentality.
“IT MEANS THAT THE BLACK PEOPLE RULE EVERYTHING .”
You must be blind. Where are the Blacks on Wall Street? How many Blacks are in major political positions around the world? The police must be so afraid that millions of Blacks are in jail. Blacks rule so much that they had to be enslaved, shipped, lynched, and set on fire publicly for 200+ years.
You are out of your mind.
Why are people rushing to the defense of the boys when there are more questions?
If they didn’t do anything wrong, why leave the scene of the crime?
Instead, they left, stories got mixed up, shomrim members didn’t have their stories straight.
If the boys are being honest, they would have waited for police, have their defense wounds reported. Only the Black boy had wounds!
If the teen was agitated and carrying a weapon, WHY get out of the car instead of calling for the police?
Nobody knows why the boy stopped with his testimony. There’s more to this story about his mental state, he could be ill and if he did suffer any damage to his brain, if it has gone untreated, that would explain his caving in from PTSD.
Shame on all of you. Liars supporting liars. Your minds are treif.
Milhouse
#7, it depends if there’s anything to appeal. The trial seemed fair; if it was, and only the verdict was unfair, then what can an appeals court do about it?
JURY NULLIFICATTION
the lawyer should be shot!
they dddnt even attempt to select a jury?
jury nullification
#7 THERE NEED S TO BE GROUNDS FOR AN APPEAL, LIKE THE JUDGE STUCK THE RECORD OF THE DEFENDANT INSTEAD OF CONSIDERING IT ECT…im not sure that is a valad reason but could at least get you in fron of a court.
Bored
Been there, done that. Call Dershowitz and spend a million dollars. (If he had a beard and a black hat like Rubashkin it would be 10 million; but his yarmulkah – excuse me, kipa – is teensy.)
The sun sets in the west & rises in the
Uh author of # 8. Most people aren’t supposed to be everywhere so you won’t see many blacks in many industries, schools, etc. until they are individuals !
For example there are a handful of Jewish MLB players yet they aren’t really jewish as their oarents aren’t Jewish according to any opinion !
When is a black no longer black, & a Jew is no longer a Jew when they become individuals with accomplishments that their communities possibly helped them finance and attain & they then become role models exploited by their sponsors who remind them were they are from !
Who are The public servants ruled by ?
The place and the table/s of the place
How Jew like my patriarchal ethics and its half a dozen chapters ?
Milhouse
#8, what are you talking about? Why should they have waited for the police, when they did nothing wrong? Since when does defending yourself have to result in wounds? The attacker was the only one with wounds, precisely because they defended themselves! Do you imagine they were supposed to wait until he hurt them and *then* defend themselves?! And why get out of the car? Because there was a lady walking her dog, and they were afraid the kid would do something to her. Preventing crime is everybody’s job, not just that of the police; that’s what Shomrim is for. Ever hear of Kitty Genovese? The most likely reason thug refused to testify is that he was afraid of being cross-examined and having his crimes exposed.
And yes, blacks don’t rule the world, but there is no question that the legal system is heavily biased towards them. Had the races been reversed in this story, it’s unlikely that charges would have been brought. The fact is that white-on-black crime is so rare that any time it’s alleged the press make a big deal of it, and the police feel compelled to go after it for fear that they’ll be accused of “racism” if they let it go.
Just look at the injustice in Florida, where the “perpetrator” isn’t even white, but the race-hustlers *thought* from his name that he was Jewish, so they went after the police who’d decided not to charge him, and drove the whole state crazy until the state decided to sacrifice an innocent person to the mob’s rage. Had his (Baptist) father’s name been Smith nobody would ever have heard about the case.
Milhouse
#10, they chose not to have a jury, because any jury would be heavily black, and likely to be biased against them because of the case in Florida (even though George Zimmerman is neither white nor Jewish).
Who can hurt worse?
One time, on the radio, a black radical was condemning white racism. A caller complained to him about racist acts committed by blacks. He said,“You are right, but you can hurt me than I can hurt you.”
Jew from america
No 14- the legal system is biased towards black people ??????? What??????? Do we live in the same country??? Because where I come from it is well known that a black person driving in the middle of night in a white neighborhood is almost asking to be pulled over and often attacked.