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The Times-Tribune
August 22, 2014
Randal Rushing handcuffed a woman, tied her handicapped son’s hands with a shirt, restrained his feet with a computer cable and bludgeoned their relative to death within earshot.
On the same morning of July 17, 2008, Mr. Rushing threatened to kill the pair at gunpoint if they were not quiet, showed his ex-girlfriend the body of her 2-year-old son’s father when she returned to the Scranton home, tied her hands with a neck tie and restrained her feet with a belt.
The state Supreme Court ruled on Monday that when Mr. Rushing restrained and threatened his ex-girlfriend Samantha Hintz along with Cynthia Collier and Matthew Collier, Mr. Rushing kidnapped the trio — on the same morning he brutally stabbed two other men to death.
The ruling reverses a state Superior Court ruling from last year that threw out kidnapping and second-degree murder convictions in Lackawanna County Court.
Superior Court judges had concluded kidnapping counts did not meet the legal definition of the crime, as Mr. Rushing did not move the victims “a substantial distance” to another place but restrained them in their own home. The second-degree murder charge — which entailed a murder committed during the commission of another crime — also failed at that point at a result.
State Supreme Court justices disagreed, noting the law also describes kidnapping as confining another person “for a substantial period in a place of isolation” to terrorize the victim, to help commit a felony or to flee after committing a felony.
“We reaffirm that the statutory requirement of confinement ‘in a place of isolation’ is not geographic in nature, but contemplates the confinement of a victim where she is separated from the normal protections of society in a fashion that makes imminent discovery or rescue unlikely,” Justice Debra McCloskey Todd wrote in the decision.
Mr. Rushing spending many years in prison was never in doubt.
The Superior Court judges had affirmed other charges including three first-degree murder counts for the killings of Justin Berrios, 20, and brothers Dustin Hinz, 22, and Leslie Collier, 16.
