September 21, 2010 3:00 a.m.
Meth-fueled rapist sentenced to 100 years
Rebecca S. Green | The Journal Gazette
FORT WAYNE – Prosecutors asked for a 90-year prison sentence for Theodore “Toby” Schwartz after he admitted to attacking and raping a woman in her south Allen County home a year ago.
But after hearing from the woman Schwartz attacked about her efforts to cobble together her life again, Allen Superior Court Judge John Surbeck sentenced Schwartz to a total of 100 years in prison Monday afternoon.
On a drug-induced, three-county crime spree late last summer, Schwartz, 40, broke into the woman’s home while she was at work.
When she returned home, she found Schwartz hiding on the basement steps. He robbed her, beat her and forced her upstairs, where he raped her. He tried to strangle her and then forced her into a closet.
To avoid capture by police, Schwartz jumped out the second-floor bathroom window and took off in the victim’s car. He ditched the car shortly afterward, and is accused of then stealing a van in Wells County, where police say he robbed a grocery store and rammed a sheriff’s car before fleeing into a cornfield.
The Journal Gazette will not name the woman, who spoke during Monday’s hearing, because she is the victim of a sex crime.
The woman knew Schwartz through his father’s company, which she had hired to do restoration work on an old barn on her property. The job took months to complete and started almost exactly a year before the attack.
“You laid in wait for her,” Surbeck said. “You knew her habits because you were at her home for 12 weeks.”
Before Surbeck handed down the sentence, Schwartz turned and faced the woman, seated amid family and friends in the front row.
“I am truly sorry for all the pain I caused,” Schwartz said, his voice trembling. “What I did was cruel, cowardly.”
Pleading guilty in August was his attempt to make things right, Schwartz said, although he admitted it wasn’t enough.
Methamphetamine turned Schwartz into a different person, he said, causing him to lose concern in his work, his finances and his children.
“It drove me to the brink of insanity,” Schwartz said.
But Stacey Speith, Allen County deputy prosecutor, pointed out that Schwartz’s troubles with addiction went beyond just the past few years. And in his statements to probation officers before his sentencing, Schwartz said he never went anywhere without a one-pot meth lab with him, Speith said.
The woman’s mother described looking out her kitchen window and seeing a strange car at her daughter’s home, about a quarter-mile up the road.
She watched Schwartz knock her daughter to the driveway and she tried to figure out how to help.
“I got my rifle and I was going to go down there,” she said. “But I couldn’t find the shells.”
She went down anyway, taking her car and noting the license plate on the car Schwartz drove.
The woman’s mother went inside, saw the house in disarray and crept upstairs, barely hearing voices over the noise of the air conditioner. As she put her hand on the bedroom door to go inside, something made her stop, turn around and go get more help.
The older woman went to another neighbor’s home, where they called police before going back to the daughter’s home.
The crime is always with her, as well as the victim, she said.
The woman’s cousin Robin Stark described how the victim “lives, sleeps and eats in a crime scene, every day” and is working hard to find normalcy again.
The victim described how that August 2009 day left her life in ruins.
“In a few short minutes, the future went dark,” she said, describing how she wasn’t sure he wouldn’t kill her. “I know I’ll never be the same person again.”
In sentencing Schwartz, originally charged with 15 felonies, Surbeck grouped the nine crimes to which he pleaded guilty into two categories – the property crime and the sexual assault.
He sentenced Schwartz to 50 years in prison on the charges of burglary and robbery and 18 months on the charge of receiving stolen auto parts. He ordered those sentences to be served at the same time, for a total of 50 years.
Surbeck then sentenced Schwartz to 50 years in prison on the charge of rape, with a variety of sentences for the two charges of criminal deviate conduct and an additional charge of strangulation. The battery charge was merged into the other charges, and like the first group, Surbeck ordered those sentences to be served at the same time.
But he ordered the 50 years for the property crime and the 50 years for the sexual assault to be served consecutively, for a total prison sentence of 100 years.
“He made the choice,” Surbeck said. “He was not mentally disabled by drugs, but drugs probably enabled him to get past his prohibitions.”
Surbeck granted the prosecutor’s request to dismiss the six other charges – mostly all drug-related – to which Schwartz had yet to enter a plea.
Additional charges are pending in Wells, Adams and Jay counties.
After the hearing, the woman said she was surprised by the length of the sentence.
She said she feels sorry for Schwartz’s family, who spoke emotionally at the hearing and expressed pain for not only Schwartz but the victim as well.
“I hope this will help me move on,” she said.
http://www.journalgazette.net/article/20100921/LOCAL03/309219994