Summary: Two Virginia lawyers retaliate over one of them getting fired by stabbing and torturing the firm’s managing partner.
With today’s tough legal market, getting let go from your firm can be felt as a tremendous affront. Perhaps that is how Alecia Schmuhl, 30, took it since she allegedly retaliated against her law firm Bean Kinney by driving to the managing partner’s upscale million dollar home in Mclean and having her husband, also a lawyer, stab him and his wife.
This all went down Sunday night when Andrew Schmuhl, 31, a former judge advocate in the Army at Fort Belvoir, posed as a policeman, tasering the hiring manager, cuffing him in flexible cuffs, and, upon the victim’s wife coming in to see what was going on, also stabbing and cuffing her and depositing her in the bathroom.
The two Virginia lawyers subsequently held the two for a “torture session” as one prosecutor called it, as the Washington Post reported. This went on for hours before the the victims, both 61-years-old, managed to trigger an alarm system, after which the assaulting couple fled the scene.
This began at about 6:30 p.m., but police weren’t alerted until after 9:45 p.m. The subsequent manhunt, which made use of a helicopter and dozens of officers, located the couple an hour later on Old Keene Mill Road in the Springfield area.
Alecia Schmuhl has worked on the board of the Arlington-Alexandria Coalition for the Homeless, and was referred to by another board member as “constructive and helpful.” She studied law at Indiana’s Valparaiso University Law School in 2009.
Though her husband has not yet been formally charged, she appeared in a Fairfax County courtroom Friday and is to be held without bond.
The deplorable incident may be a symptom of legal sector tensions at large, though that is of course no excuse.