Desperately seeking justice in Bedford Town Court

Desperately seeking justice in Bedford Town Court

By EVE MARX
It’s hard to know where to begin discussing Ethan Weibman, the 20-year-old Bedford man accused in Maryland of killing and torturing kittens and cats. No matter how you look at it, it’s a sad situation because Ethan, if he is guilty of these allegations, is undeniably sick.

He is due to appear in the Baltimore courts next month facing charges of animal cruelty that occurred on March 22 and again on April 5. Documents from the Baltimore court case accuse him of selecting cats to adopt at several shelters before breaking their teeth, beating and cutting them, and shooting them with a B.B. gun.

What many people locally don’t know is that Ethan, who is a graduate of Fox Lane High School, has been appearing in the Bedford Town Court since 2010 for his behavior behind the wheel. Appearing before Judge Kevin Quaranta last year, Ethan was charged with driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol. His driving offenses have dragged through the Bedford court for quite some time. His attorney, Andy Rubin of Mancuso, Rubin & Fufidio in White Plains, months ago brokered an arrangement with the Bedford court to have all three counts against Ethan rolled into one complaint. He was advised at the time to cooperate with the probation department and keep his nose clean.

It was while on probation for the driving offenses that Ethan moved to Baltimore and allegedly began abusing cats. He was arrested in Maryland on May 29, mere days after Judge Quaranta set the conditions for his probation in the Bedford courthouse on May 26.

Last week, on Thursday, Sept. 15, Ethan, his lawyer and his parents appeared again in Judge Quaranta’s court.

Although his case was called early before the bench, the family delayed the proceedings for an hour and a half. When he finally got in front of the judge, the assistant district attorney, Nicholas DiCostanzo, requested Ethan be remanded into custody for violating his probation. According to the district attorney’s office, he had been an hour late for an appointment with the probation department, and he seems to have completely blown off another appointment. But the worst thing he did to violate the terms of his probation was to be accused of committing these other crimes.

As the family huddled in the courthouse hallway, Ethan was visibly upset. In the hall when I tried to speak to him, the young man said, “I want to tell you my story,” and trust me, it’s a story I would like to hear. Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ll get the chance, as his lawyer and father intervened, stating that Ethan had “no comment.”

In the midst of this drama, Ethan’s psychiatrist from Manhattan appeared. The doctor’s role in the courthouse seemed to be to inform the judge that Ethan is ill and requires special handling. And Ethan did get special handling. Although another man who appeared before the bench 20 minutes earlier for breaking his probation was told to report the next night to jail for months of weekend incarceration, Ethan was sent home for the weekend, advised to take his meds, and instructed to come back to Bedford court on Monday.

On Monday, just like Ethan, I returned to the courtroom. It was there Judge Quaranta said a number of things that struck me as rather remarkable. In response to the assistant district attorney’s repeating of the information that Ethan has trouble showing up for his probation appointments, the judge said, “Mr. Weibman appears to be a person who might not have it all together.” He also said he was aware of the several charges facing Mr. Weibman in the Baltimore courts. He said, “At first blush, these charges seem disturbing.” That was a showstopper. Really? At first blush? How many times do we need to “blush” at the thought of repeated acts of animal mutilation?

Judge Quaranta said he is adamant he “will not try the Baltimore case” in the Bedford courts. Baltimore is Baltimore and Bedford is Bedford. At first blush, to borrow Judge Quaranta’s phrase, the two cases are apples and oranges. One is about driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs, and breaking probation; the other is about torturing and killing cats. Beyond the blush, however, they are related because when Ethan was charged in Maryland with animal cruelty, he was on probation, probation meted out to him in Bedford.

The allegations against Mr. Weibman are particularly disturbing because you don’t have to be a psychologist or work in law enforcement to be aware of the connection between extreme violence toward animals and extreme violence toward humans. A growing body of research indicates that people who commit acts of cruelty to animals rarely stop there. People who abuse animals are not only dangerous to animal victims but may also be dangerous to human beings, according to most experts in the field.

The Westchester County district attorney’s office would like to see Ethan in custody. As it stands, he’s currently living in his Bedford home.

“Stay on your meds, report to your probation officer, and don’t be wandering around,” Judge Quaranta said on Monday.

In court on Monday morning, Ethan appeared calm and serene. His mother was with him, but not his father or psychiatrist. The judge told him, “Any further incidents that alarm this court or probation will advance this matter and possibly remand.”

I thought about last summer when I went to court to see Lisa Turkki, the mentally disturbed woman visiting her family in Bedford, accused of stabbing her nieces. Ms. Turkki was remanded to a psychiatric ward where she remains in custody. Ethan will get his day in court in Baltimore.

Meanwhile, he remains relatively free in Bedford, despite breaking his probation and accusations of new and heinous crimes. He is scheduled to appear in Bedford Town Court on Oct. 17. I guess I’ll have to be there.

Thoughts on hurricanes and 9-11

By the time you read this, Irene will be a distant memory, and hopefully your basement didn’t flood again in the wake of Lee and Katia. While September is often a beautiful month, it can be wrathful. As a kid, I remember Hurricane Esther, a Category 4, Cape Verde-type storm sweeping through the mid-Atlantic in September 1961. Where I lived in Atlantic City, winds gusted 69 mph, and parts of the boardwalk were destroyed, a stretch of homes and businesses by the Inlet took 30 years to rebuild, and the seals and sea lions and porpoises that made up Captain Starn’s maritime circus were released into the ocean days before the storm so they would have time to swim away from certain harm. For months afterwards, I spent hours every day meandering through the heaps of seaweed and debris that littered the shore, debris heaved up from the bottom of the sea that included old suitcases and mattresses and bedsprings, dead animals, and tar, tons of tar.

Thankfully our home in Katonah survived Irene very well. We took in no water and no trees fell on our house. It was a nuisance to be without power for three days, but that’s all it was: a nuisance. After Day One, where we grilled everything from our refrigerator that could be grilled, Mr. Sax and I agreed to mostly starve ourselves and eat dinner out. During the day, we got by with easy finger food, like dried fruit and nuts. From now on in, we will keep a stash of “survival food” in the house, which will include almonds, prunes, dried apricots, flax seed granola, water, and chocolate. Mr. Sax insists beer and cola are essentials, too; beer because it’s wet and has nutrition, and cola because it’s medical. How do I know this is true? I once saw a vet tubing it into a horse with a mild case of colic to relieve tummy trouble.

It’s inescapable that September 11 come and go without a nod to 9-11. Everyone’s first memory of the day was that it was so beautiful. I must admit that 8 or 9 anniversaries of this date have come and gone for me without much attention. Still, the 10^th anniversary seems particularly affecting. Certain memories of the day remain vivid; walking down the road to see my neighbor outside on her cell, trying to reach her husband who that morning had an early meeting downtown; driving into Katonah and watching the first people coming off the train, some of them still covered in ashes; talking to a man who had walked out of a smoldering tower into the ravaged streets where he walked over to the West Side highway to hitch a ride north with a truck driver. A small thing that no one will remember but me is that 9-11 is also when my book, “View from the Porch” was released. I remember feeling a lot of despair because the book is, at heart, domestic comedy, and at such a time, comedy seemed inappropriate. Much later, people told me that they found solace in my book, because after so many months of pain and grieving, they were ready for something cheery. A few weeks ago I was on the phone with the attorney for Judy Clark, the civil rights activist who had a secondary, non-shooting role in the attempted robbery of a Brinks truck in 1981 that left three people dead, and who is currently in Bedford Correctional serving a 75 years to life sentence. The attorney told me she had read “View from the Porch,” and found it “poignant.” I was touched by that. Part of the poignancy, I said, is because the book was written well before 9-11. “It seems innocent, even naïve, to me now,” I said, a bit sadly. “A relic from a time before we were consumed by terrorism.”

Anyone who knows me knows I’m obsessed with popular idioms. For the better part of a year, I keep hearing the phrase “moving forward,” being uttered. I hear it from the general public, on TV, and from politicians. I did a little research and it seems to be a corporate-speak idiom that, like, “best practices,” originated among suits around 2003, and has since drifted into the common vernacular. The phrase at first bugged me. It seemed a glib way of saying you didn’t see any point in rehashing any old business, when to my mind, old business is usually of significance. We learn from our mistakes. History repeats itself. Not to mention, I love a good blast from the past.

Lately I’ve made peace with “moving forward,” although, like Albert Einstein said, I never think of the future; it comes soon enough. I was freaked to see how many fun, even frivolous events around town this year are taking place on 9-11. That seemed irreverent. But then people who experienced serious losses 10 years ago on that day told me they were ready to “move forward,” and that was a head changer. I’ll leave you with this thought from the poet Maya Angelou, who said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, they’ll forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” So hug someone this Sunday. Or make them laugh. That’s what I call moving forward.