Federal prosecutors want a former caretaker at a Beaver County special needs facility to go to prison for the maximum term, 17 years, for systematically abusing patients with his caretaker pal, recording the assaults and then joking about what they were doing.
Zachary Dinell, who carried out the attacks at McGuire Memorial, will be sentenced Thursday in federal court.
His plea agreement calls for a stipulated sentence of 14 to 17 years.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Olshan said Dinell deserves the max.
The severely handicapped, nonverbal patients were helpless, he said, and Dinell and the other caretaker, Tyler Smith, preyed on them for their own enjoyment as expressed in back-and-forth text messages.
“They suffered in silence, and they suffered for Dinell’s and Smith’s amusement — so Dinell could record assaults and ridicule his and Smith’s victims in abhorrent text messages,” Olshan said in arguing for the harshest prison term. “The seriousness of the defendant’s conduct cannot be overstated; it warrants serious punishment.”
Dinell, who was sentenced in state court in 2020 to 10 to 31 years in prison for the assaults, pleaded guilty in October to federal hate crimes counts as well as conspiracy and concealing material facts.
The state case addressed the attacks themselves, but the federal prosecution is focused on the motive: hatred of the patients.
“Dinell and Smith assaulted their victims because they were disabled,” Olshan said. “They acknowledged as much in their copious text exchanges. Every person in the United States is entitled to equal respect and dignity under the law without regard to, for example, the color of their skin, what religion they practice, or whether they are disabled.”
Olshan said a 17-year sentence will send a message to the thousands of other care workers in the U.S. that they will face serious consequences in the federal court system for any crimes against protected classes.
He also pointed out that Dinell, 30, has had other brushes with the law. After abusing the McGuire patients but before he got caught, he racked up convictions for resisting arrest and three DUIs.
Dinell’s lawyer, Ryan Smith, is asking for a term within the guideline range of 168 to 188 months, although the plea agreement calls for a range of up to 204 months.
Smith didn’t try to explain Dinell’s conduct beyond recounting a difficult upbringing in which his father physically abused his mother and the parents later divorced.
He said only that Dinell has learned his lesson and won’t commit any more crimes.
He said his client is disappointed in himself.
“He has trouble, himself, articulating a reason for his conduct,” Smith said.
The victims cannot speak, so their families will speak for them. Smith said he knows some will think the prison term too light.
Dinell and Smith were indicted last year. Prosecutors said the pair committed numerous violent and humiliating acts against the patients — punching and kicking them, rubbing caustic substances into their eyes, choking them.
In many cases, they filmed the acts on their phones and then shared the videos with each other while describing with delight what they’d done.
In one text from September 2016, Dinell told Smith that the patients were “less than people.”
The texts are full of hatred and vile descriptions of patients.
In one, Smith told Dinell that one patient “won’t be satisfied until he gets thrown off the highest point of a steel cage onto concrete to put him outta his misery.”
Dinell said he was thinking about throwing that patient into a dumpster so “they’d take him out with the garbage.”
The case against Smith is pending.
Torsten covers the courts for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he's currently on strike. Reach him at jtorsteno@gmail.com.
