BUFFALO, NY -- Twenty year old Joey Crapsi was born Deaf and is also developmentally disabled. While at the Wende Correctional Facility in Alden, an inmate demanded that his family pay him thousands of dollars to make sure Joey wouldn’t be killed.
“Please don’t go to the police, or I will be in very serious problems,” said the inmate in one of two letters read by Crapsi’s mother, Cindy McKillen. He wrote that if the police were notified Joey would be dead. Another letter threatened harm to Joey’s family as well.
Joey Crapsi was convicted of inappropriately touching his five year old cousin. He was sentenced from one to three years in prison after he violated his parole.
Joey’s advocate, Angela Boyle, says he has tested to the level of a six to a nine year old. She has been working to improve his treatment behind bars. “It needs to go to the media because it’s a big problem,” she says.
When he started serving his sentence at the Fishkill Correctional Facility, Joey told his mother that a corrections officer had slapped him in the head, breaking his cochlear implant, which allows him to hear.
The family says he was without the device for six months and couldn’t communicate or express himself properly. He also began acting out and getting written-up as a discipline problem... Read The Full Story.
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