Saturday, January 09, 1999
Man kills co-worker, holds hostages
BY TANYA BRICKING, WALT SCHAEFER and LEW MOORES
The Cincinnati Enquirer
WILLIAMSBURG TOWNSHIP — Scott Throckmorton and Matthew Sage were more than co-workers at a Clermont County group home for the mentally disabled. They were friends.
But police say Mr. Throckmorton, who recently was fired for sleeping on the job, snapped Friday, killed his 28-year-old friend and returned to the group home, where he held more than a dozen people hostage.
Mr. Throckmorton, 26, of Moorfield Drive in Anderson Township, was armed with two handguns when the hostage standoff began just after 5 a.m. Friday at the Bastin Home on rural Bass Road off Ohio 133 between the villages of Williamsburg and Bethel.
Inside the ranch-style home, he held four staff members and about a dozen severely mentally disabled people.
As police from Clermont County and surrounding agencies tried to talk Mr. Throckmorton into surrendering, they learned about Mr. Sage, who had been stabbed to death at his Williamsburg home on South Fourth Street.
By 11:15 a.m., Clermont County sheriff's deputies had arrested Mr. Throckmorton and charged him with murder. He was being held at the Clermont County Jail and was scheduled to appear Monday in municipal court for a bond hearing.
Rory Banziger, superintendent of the Clermont County Board of Mental Retardation
and Developmental Disabilities (MRDD), said Mr. Throckmorton gave up after releasing the last of the four staff members — a woman he believed turned him in about three weeks ago for sleeping on the job.
Mr. Banziger said the independently operated home is run under contract with the county MRDD board and licensed by the state department of MRDD.
Debbie Bastin, the group home's provider who worked with both men, said they had been friends but declined to elaborate. She was not there at the time of the hostage-taking. She learned the day's details in bits and pieces.
“I've been through a great ordeal today,” she said Friday evening, as she tried to get residents back into the home's routine and prepared for a re view from state officials to make sure the home still meets licensing criteria.
“Matt (Sage) was a good man,” she said. “He had a kind heart. He was devoted to people who had developmental disabilities. He enjoyed working with handicapped people, and he was good to them. I do know the residents liked him and enjoyed being around him, and he enjoyed being around them.”
Neighbors woke Friday to find crime-scene tape surrounding his corner lot, a modest home he had been rehabbing.
“We all feel that it's an unfortunate and sad thing,” said Terri Hildebrant, 41, a neighbor who remembered Mr. Sage as tall, attractive and well-liked. “He was just a pleasant person.”
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