Federal judge describes her experience with 'brutal' home invaders at their sentencing
U.S. District Judge Susan Dlott and her husband, Stan Chesley, described on Thursday how three home invaders terrorized them as they demanded Rolex watches, threatened to kill them and pushed Chesley down the stairs.
Dlott and Chesley testified during a sentencing hearing for the men, who were each sentenced to 34 years in prison after pleading guilty, report WCPO and the Cincinnati Enquirer. Chesley broke several vertebrae and suffered a concussion when the men pushed him down the stairs, and he has lasting pain in his back and memory problems as a result, he and his wife told the court.
“I have to say that I have never been the same,” Chesley said, according to the WCPO account. “I have flashes. I have events. Somebody will talk to me. I’ll see a TV story. I’ll see a gun on a TV show and I blank. My ability of memory is not what it was.”
Dlott said she awakened in her suburban Cincinnati home on Dec. 4 to see the three men pointing guns at her and her husband. “They were brutal,” Dlott said. “They were violent. They kept calling us mother f****** over and over again. … They told us they were going to murder us if we didn’t give them everything. That night will remain in my memory as the most horrible and frightening experience of my life.”
Dlott said she and her husband persuaded the men to take their cars. When she pushed the buttons for the garage doors an alarm sounded, and the men “were all kind of taken aback,” Dlott said. At that point, Dlott told her husband they needed to run into the woods behind their house.
Chesley had difficulty moving because of his injuries, so he remained in the woods with the family’s dog while Dlott ran barefoot for about 20 minutes to get help from the nearest neighbors.
Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters said the men targeted Dlott and Chesley after seeing them in their luxury car as they drove home from a pizza dinner. The men bought marijuana and smoked it before breaking into the home. They were arrested after the incident when police saw their car fail to stop at a stop sign. Their trunk was open and stolen items were inside.
Prosecutors believe the men were responsible for three other home invasion robberies. They are Darrell Kinney, Terry Jackson Jr. and Demetrius Williams.
