Teenager Admits Maryland Slaying to Court in Israel

Samuel Sheinbein was silent on the subject for two years. On Thursday, he spoke only a single word.

“Yes,” the stone-faced Maryland teenager said when an Israeli judge asked him whether he strangled an acquaintance with a rope in a middle-class suburb of Washington, D.C., then cut up the body with an electric saw and burned the parts.

Under a plea bargain that infuriated U.S. prosecutors, Sheinbein, 19, is to be sentenced to 24 years in an Israeli prison for the 1997 killing. He will probably be paroled after 14 years, counting the two years he has already spent in Israeli custody. He could have received a much tougher sentence if he were convicted as an adult in the United States.

Sheinbein fled to Israel shortly after the killing of Alfredo Tello Jr., 19, in September 1997 and successfully fought extradition.

On Thursday, standing handcuffed between two policemen, Sheinbein stared straight ahead as the verdict was read out, ignoring the camera crews that packed the Tel Aviv District Court just as he had ignored questions shouted at him when he arrived.

Although he has picked up some basic Hebrew, Sheinbein listened to an interpreter translate the proceedings into English. When asked by Judge Uri Goren if he had strangled Tello and cut up and burned his body, Sheinbein answered “ken,” the Hebrew word for yes.

The sentence will not be handed down until Oct. 11, after a social worker has submitted a report on Sheinbein. The report is required because Sheinbein was 17--a minor--at the time of the killing.

The man who would have had jurisdiction to prosecute Sheinbein in Maryland, Douglas Gansler, said Thursday it was “a miscarriage of justice” that Sheinbein was tried in Israel.