Woman at center of Tacony torture case may face hate-crime charges

After the arrest last month of Linda Ann Weston, who is accused of imprisoning four mentally disabled adults in a Tacony basement, District Attorney Seth Williams said authorities would file as many charges against her as possible.

With an FBI investigation under way, law enforcement sources said it appeared increasingly likely that Weston, 51, would be charged under a 2009 federal hate-crimes law that allows for prosecution of those who target the disabled.

The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, passed in 2009, expanded the earlier hate-crimes law to include victims' sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.

If Weston is indicted under the act, it will be the first time anyone in the country is charged under the law's provision for crimes against the disabled, said Mark Kappelhoff, chief of the criminal section of the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division.

Weston's alleged crimes include kidnapping her victims, moving them from state to state, stealing their Social Security checks, and subjecting them to starvation and neglect over a number of years.

Also charged in the case are Weston's 48-year-old boyfriend, Gregory Thomas; her 32-year-old daughter, Jean McIntosh; and 50-year-old Eddie Wright, a street preacher from Texas.

FBI Special Agent J.J. Klaver, a spokesman for the agency's Philadelphia division, declined to comment on the involvement of federal authorities and said he could not discuss an open investigation.

Kappelhoff, who is based in Washington, confirmed that his office had also opened an investigation into the case but he declined to comment on its specific details.

Those convicted under the act face a maximum of 10 years in prison without the possibility of parole. If the victim was killed, the offender may face life in prison.

Since the Shepard-Byrd law was enacted, just four such cases have been prosecuted. All involved victims' race or religion, said Kappelhoff, who helped draft the legislation.

Federal authorities wanted the Shepard-Byrd Act to cover crimes against the disabled after noticing that disabled victims always emerged in the FBI's annual hate-crime statistics, Kappelhoff said. The 2010 report found that 0.6 percent of the country's hate-crime victims were disabled people.

"Each year there were always incidents where disabled people were attacked," he said.

Lawyers seeking to prosecute under Shepard-Byrd must prove that the offender acted with bias against his victim, Kappelhoff said.

In the first case prosecuted under the law, two New Mexico men were charged in 2010 with committing a racially motivated assault against a 22-year-old Navajo man who was also developmentally disabled.

Paul Beebe and Jesse Sanford of Farmington, N.M., pleaded guilty to luring the man to Beebe's apartment and branding him with a swastika.

"In this case, that man was targeted because of his race," Kappelhoff said. "But he was also taken advantage of due to his disability. That vulnerability, however, made it easier for them to lure him to their house."

Curt Decker, executive director of the National Disability Rights Network, said crimes against the disabled are sometimes crimes of opportunity, committed by people who take advantage of the victim's disability.

"A man mugging a blind person because he knows they can't chase after him might not rise to a level of hate crime," he said. "It's hard to prove hatred in that situation."

Weston's alleged treatment of the four victims in her captivity, however - starving them, abusing them, and forcing them to live in confined spaces - is an indication that she felt animosity toward them, Decker said.

"This is a woman who was taking advantage of their vulnerabilities," he said, "but also may have chosen them as victims based on those disabilities."