The plot was bizarre, carefully planned and amateurishly executed: To make money in America, three young men from refugee families set out to find a wealthy woman, abduct her from her home and hold her for ransom.
It all unraveled as soon as Audrey Levicki answered the door to her Southwest Roanoke County home.
Suspicious that the two men were not the Red Cross volunteers they claimed to be, Levicki braced the door with her foot and then slammed it shut on the arm of the one who tried to reach inside.
The two men ran off, despite months of planning and a getaway car waiting at the end of the driveway with rope, handcuffs and other tools of a kidnapping. The duo was quickly arrested along with two accomplices, setting in motion a series of unintended consequences that culminated Monday at a sentencing hearing in U.S. District Court in Roanoke.
Levicki, whose intended fate was to be held in a rundown camper until her captors could collect up to $1 million from her corporate executive husband, said that she is now a prisoner in her own home.
“My life went to hell on April 6,” Levicki said in a statement to Judge James Turk, recounting how the incident led to fearful days, sleepless nights and a loss of security so profound that she no longer ventures outside to feed the dog unless armed with a baseball bat.
For the three African natives who tried to kidnap Levicki — Luke Musa Elbino, 20; Mohammed Hussein Guhad, 20; and Joshua Kasongo, 19 — the consequences went beyond the five-and-a-half-year prison terms they received at the end of a daylong hearing.
Once they are released from prison, the three face almost certain deportation back to Somalia, Sudan and Rwanda — countries their families fled when they were boys to escape civil war and genocide.
In a case full of ironies — the defendants had no prior criminal records and were seen as good students at Roanoke-area high schools and Virginia Western Community College — their backgrounds as political refugees was perhaps the most striking.
“They went through terror themselves, so I couldn’t imagine them inflicting that on anyone else,” Barbara Smith, the retired head of the nonprofit Refugee and Immigration Services office in Roanoke, said while testifying for the defendants.
A fourth defendant, U.S. citizen Anthony Boyd-Muse, 18, received four and a half years in prison for playing a lesser role in the incident.
Before he decided to give the men less time than recommended by federal sentencing guidelines, Turk called it one of the toughest cases he’s heard during his 37 years on the bench.
At times, the hearing bordered on surreal. On one side of the jam-packed courtroom, residents of an affluent suburban neighborhood sat in support of Levicki. Across the aisle — and from halfway across the world — sat the friends and families of the defendants. Many of them refugees, some were dressed in colorful native robes and headscarves.
Emotions ran high all day; court was recessed after Elbino’s sister fainted and fell from her seat in the gallery. At another point, a spectator pointed his finger skyward and chanted an African song.
Yet as strange as the hearing was, the crime that preceded it was even more so.
While abductions are not unusual in Roanoke, it is almost unheard of for a victim to be selected by complete strangers with ransom as a motive.
“They were looking for a wealthy victim,” FBI Special Agent Scott Mayne testified. “This isn’t something that they just hatched one day and executed the next. They thought about this.”
As they scoped out affluent neighborhoods in Southwest Roanoke County, the young men used a laptop computer to research potential targets. They settled on Levicki in part because her husband, George Levicki, is CEO of Delta Dental of Virginia. With the cash reserves of some executives possibly limited by the recession, the aspiring kidnappers figured health care was a good source for ransom money, Mayne testified.
Once they picked out a victim, the men bought masks, wigs and false sideburns from novelty shops. They also stocked up on nylon rope, binoculars, handcuffs and duct tape. They acquired a .32-caliber handgun, but settled on a BB-gun pistol because it looked more sinister.
Although Elbino had the BB gun tucked in his waistband when he and Guhad went to Levicki’s doorstep, the weapon was never brandished during the short-lived kidnapping attempt.
Elbino was the only defendant to testify Monday. “Throughout the whole scenario, the whole plot, it felt like I wasn’t there,” he said. “It wasn’t me, it was somebody else.”
But as he stood at the doorstep and saw Levicki’s terrified expression, Elbino said, the image of his mother’s face suddenly came to him — and with it the realization that he would never want his mother to be in such a position.
“From that point on, my eyes were opened and I realized what I was doing was very bad,” he testified. “That’s why I ran.”
Elbino, a track star at William Byrd High School who turned down a college scholarship so he could stay close to his family, attributed the crime to “stupidity and arrogance.”
As did many of the defendant’s family members and friends, Elbino apologized profusely to Levicki as she sat in the courtroom. “If you could find it somewhere in your heart to forgive me, that’s the only thing that matters,” he told her.
Before Elbino and his co-defendants were led from the courtroom, each was given the opportunity to hug his parents as weeping relatives watched.
His hands already in shackles, Kasongo lifted them above his mother’s head and held her in a long embrace. His mother, her face contorted by grief, then turned to Levicki, who was sitting just a few feet away.
“I’m so sorry, ma’am,” she said.
“So am I,” Levicki replied.