Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Judge Won’t Drop Charges on Baltimore Shomrim

A Baltimore judge will not drop the charges against two Jewish brothers accused of beating a black teenager.

Judge Pamela White on Tuesday denied the motion to drop the charges against Avi and Eliyahu Werdesheim, according to The Associated Press.

The brothers have pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree assault, false imprisonment and carrying a deadly weapon in the alleged beating of Corey Ausby in November 2010. They face up to 13 years in prison if convicted on all three counts.

At the time of the incident, Eliyahu, now 24, was a member of the Jewish neighborhood watch group Shomrim. Avi is now 21.

On April 26, White also denied a separate motion filed on behalf of Ausby to drop the charges.

“It was not your decision whether to bring charges against the defendants, it’s the state’s decision,” she told the teen, according to the Baltimore Sun.

The Sun reported that Ausby said on the stand, “I been wanting to drop the charges all the time, I didn’t even want to go through [this].”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.