Man to serve five years for setting body on fire
http://www.insidenova.com/news/crime_police/man-to-serve-five-years-for-setting-body-on-fire/article_c2cc4418-0a57-11e3-805d-001a4bcf887a.html
Authorities don’t know exactly what happened in Olde Towne Inn’s room 43 in the early morning hours of Oct. 30, prosecutors said Thursday.
What is known is that 44-year-old Antonio Bailey died there, and he died of a drug overdose, according to the medical examiner.
“We have no idea the circumstances surrounding that event,” assistant commonwealth’s attorney Brian Boyle said.
Prosecutors do know that after Bailey was dead, Richard Dale Sword and his brother, Gerry Lee Sword, who had been hanging out with Bailey before his death took his lifeless body, put it in a van, drove it across the street from the motel and set it on fire.
The Sword brothers both pleaded guilty to concealing a dead body, a class 6 felony. At a hearing in Prince William Circuit Court Thursday, substitute Judge Benjamin Kendrick sentenced Richard Sword, 51, of Springfield, to serve five years in prison, the maximum allowed by law. He also ordered Sword to serve three years of probation after his release. Gerry Sword is set to be sentenced in December.
Thursday, Bailey’s sister, Veronica Bailey wiped tears from her eyes on the witness stand as she spoke about the loss of her brother.
“It has took a terrible toll on everyone,” Veronica Bailey said of her family, adding that her mother was hit especially hard by Bailey’s death.
“It tore her apart,” she said. “Tony was her baby boy…someone just took her baby, and they just burned him like he was trash, like he was nothing.
Prosecutors said Bailey, Richard Sword and Gerry Sword were drinking and “partying” in their motel room on the night of Oct. 29, as Hurricane Sandy passed through the area.
About 3 a.m. on Oct. 30, a surveillance video from the motel, which prosecutors played in court Thursday, shows Richard and Gerry Sword dragging Bailey’s body out of the hotel room, placing it in Richard Sword’s white Ford van and driving across the street to a vacant parking lot on the 9000 block of Church Street in Manassas. There, at 3:18 a.m., according to the surveillance footage, Richard Sword set Bailey’s body on fire.
Police said Bailey’s body was discovered in the parking lot just after 7:30 a.m. that day.
According to the medical examiner’s report, Bailey died of an overdose of Benadryl, Prozac and alcohol. Because no soot was found in his nose or lungs, the medical examiner determined that Bailey died before his body was set on fire.
Veronica Bailey said she spoke to her brother on the phone the night before he died and “felt something funny.”
She said Richard Sword took the phone from Bailey and spoke to her.
“He promised me that he would take care of my brother,” she said through tears Thursday. “And he didn’t.”
Richard Dale Sword is charged with illegally disposing of a body.
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