http://www.telegram.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061012/NEWS/610120755/1008/NEWS02
Oct 12, 2006
Jury finds former officer guilty of assault
By Elaine Thompson TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF
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MARLBORO [MASSACHUSSETTS]— A Marlboro District Court jury has found a former Hudson police officer guilty of assault and battery on his wife in June. He is expected to have a second trial on similar charges later this year.
After a two-day jury trial, which began Oct. 5 and ended Tuesday, Judge David Locke sentenced George West, 48, of 290 Berlin St., Apt. 2, Clinton, to one year in the Middlesex County House of Correction. All but 42 days of the sentence was suspended. Mr. West was given credit for the 42 days he has been jailed while awaiting trial in a subsequent assault and battery case. He will be on probation until Oct. 20, 2008, and was ordered to undergo a mental health evaluation. His wife, Fatima West, 38, has told authorities that she thinks her husband of 17 years has a bipolar condition.
Mr. West remains in jail because of the subsequent case, in which he is accused of breaking in to the home on Mechanic Street where his wife lived on Sept. 5. He is charged with assault and battery and unarmed burglary. A judge ruled that he was too dangerous to be released and he has been held without bail since his arrest.
Mr. West has requested a jury trial for that case. His court-appointed lawyer, Mark Wester of Hudson, yesterday said a trial is expected to be scheduled at the next court hearing on Oct. 19. The $5,000 cash bail that relatives from the Leominster area posted for his release after the June arrest was revoked when he was arrested in September.
Mr. Wester said police were called to the couple’s home on June 17 and Sept. 5 because Mrs. West wanted out of the marriage but Mr. West “didn’t get the message quick enough.” “I’m surprised the jury convicted him and I’m disappointed because there were many inconsistencies in (Mrs. West’s) versions of what occurred,” Mr. Wester said a telephone interview yesterday.
In her written account of what happened on June 17, Mrs. West said she told her husband that she no longer had feelings for him because of the way she had been treated and that she had had an affair. She also wrote that she had told him that to make him want to leave. She told authorities that her husband became angry and pulled her shirt and shorts off before threatening to cut her into pieces and kill himself.
Mrs. West testified at the dangerousness hearing in September, but declined to testify against her husband in the trial.
At the September hearing, Mrs. West denied telling her husband that she no longer loved him or that she had been with another man.
In her written statement, Mrs. West said that when her husband left their bedroom to go to the kitchen to get the knife, she ran across the hallway and hid in her 11-year-old son’s bedroom closet. Mrs. West said her husband found her within a couple of minutes and she screamed for her 15-year-old daughter to call 911. She said her husband covered her mouth with one hand and carried her back to their bedroom. Mrs. West said her husband held a knife about five inches from her stomach and pretended that he was stabbing her. Over the years, even while he was a Hudson police officer, Mr. West would tell his wife that he was going to kill her and the two children and bury them, she told police.
“George is not a bad person. He just needs mental help,” she wrote in her statement to police. In the second case, Mrs. West told authorities her husband attempted to climb through a window while she and her children were asleep in the early morning hours of Sept. 5. She said he was only able to get his upper body inside the window before she awakened and tried to keep him out. She said his head was moving back and forth as he tried to get in and his head accidentally struck her neck and chin area. She said he left when she started to scream.
Mr. West was hired as a Hudson police officer in 1986 and served several years as the department’s Drug Abuse Resistance Education officer. He retired from the job in 1998, saying the use of deadly force and the carrying of a weapon conflicted with his religious beliefs as a Jehovah’s Witness. Mr. Wester said his client’s last job was driving a truck for an oil company.