A resident of Beaver County, Pennsylvania, was sentenced in federal court for conspiring to commit and carrying out hate crimes against numerous severely disabled victims. Tyler Smith, 34, of New Brighton, Pennsylvania, was sentenced to 120 months’ imprisonment, followed by three years of supervised release. According to admissions made during Smith’s plea hearing, he and co-defendant Zachary Dinell were employees of an in-patient healthcare facility located in New Brighton, Pennsylvania. Residents of the facility suffered from a range of severe physical, intellectual, and emotional disabilities, and required assistance with all activities of daily life, including bathing, using the bathroom, oral hygiene, feeding, and dressing. As members of the facility’s Direct Care Staff, Smith admitted that he and Dinell were responsible for providing this daily assistance to residents.
From approximately June 2016 to September 2017, Smith admitted that he and Dinell engaged in a conspiracy to commit hate crimes against a total of 13 residents of the facility because of the residents’ actual or perceived disabilities. Many of the victims required the use of a wheelchair. Smith and Dinell carried out assaults in a variety of ways, including by punching and kicking residents, rubbing Purell hand sanitizer in their eyes, spraying mouthwash in their eyes and mouths, and, in one instance, removing a resident’s compression stocking in a manner intended to inflict pain. Several of these assaults were recorded on Dinell’s cell phone. In one instance, Smith admitted jumping on top of a 13-year-old minor while the child was lying prone on his bed with the lights off, and while Dinell filmed the incident on his cellular phone. Smith further acknowledged that immediately after recording the video, Dinell texted the video to him. As part of the conspiracy, Smith also admitted that he and Dinell exchanged graphic text messages in which they expressed their animus toward the disabled residents, shared photographs and videos of residents, described their assaults, and encouraged each other’s continued abuse of residents.
