In 1997, two young men in Silver Spring, Maryland deliberately and assassinated another young man by strangling him and then beating him on the head with a shotgun.   They took him into the garage of a vacant home,  proceeded to mutilate him, and finally they burned his body in the garage of that house.   The name of the victim of this atrocity is Alfredo Tello.

Two days later the young men told their parents that they were in trouble and needed to escape to Israel.

One of the men, Samuel Sheinbein,  was whisked by his father to JFK airport in New York and was put on a plane to Israel.  His father was a patent attorney.  The other young man, Aaron Needle was arrested and two days before his trial he hanged himself in his jail cell.

Meanwhile the father of Samuel Sheinbein was charged with obstructing justice, was disbarred and he also fled to Israel, yet therefrom he continued to work as a US patent agent even though he had been disbarred.

The parents of the victim of this barbaric assassination were obviously stunned and totally devastated.

To add insult to injury, notwithstanding the extraordinary commendable work by then State Attorney Douglas F. Gansler, to press the US Department of State to promptly request the extradition of this born American citizen and fugitive of justice,  so he could be prosecuted in the US,  Israel simply flatly refused to comply with the request and, incredibly,  got away with it.

Sheinbein did get to spend time in confinement in Israel but it was obviously under lenient conditions as he was seen in a “60 Minute” TV program stream playing tennis in the institution where he was confined.   He also was allowed to go home at certain intervals during his confinement and in one of these times off from confinement he obtained a gun, brought it back to the institution where he was staying, and apparently yesterday he shot 3 policemen in said institution, and as a result he was shot and killed.

This writer does not support the death penalty but there is an irony about the ending of this tragic saga, because had the US rightfully prevailed in having Mr. Sheinbein returned to the US for trial and sentencing, he would not only have had to spend much more time in a real prison to think, suffer, and hopefully regret what he has done, but three innocent Israeli law enforcement agents would not have been shot, one of who was severely injured.

Regardless though of the outcome, the family of the victim, Alfredo Tello, who was thought of as being “remarkably outgoing” and “made friends instantly” (Washington Post’s Katherine Shaver, Sept. 29, 2007),  endured indescribable suffering as a result of not only of the loss of their beloved son, but as well as a result of the lack of the due assertiveness of our federal government in not making it clear that severe sanctions and immediate cessation of the millions of dollars which Israel receives daily in foreign aid would be among the consequences of the Israeli outrageously arrogant impudence in its refusal to turn this fugitive of justice assassin over to the Maryland state authorities.

Unquestionably this is yet another brazen example of how the hypocritical and corrupted practice of allowing Israel to benefit from some bizarrely duplicitous “exceptionalist” standard concept, runs head on with rationality, with jurisprudence’s fundamental tenets, and offends all victims of the countless individual and collective transgressions of the power structure of Israel in ways which not only smear our image abroad but endanger our national security.