Captured child molester was psychiatrist in city

July 10, 2007|By MARLO BARNHART

HAGERSTOWN - Former Hagerstown psychiatrist and convicted child molester Alan J. Horowitz was deported Sunday morning from India to the United States, where he faces charges that he violated the terms of his parole in New York.

"We met the plane at the Newark, N.J., airport at 4 a.m. Sunday and made the arrest at the gate," U.S. Marshal Gary Mattison said. "Horowitz was accompanied by representatives of the U.S. State Department and the FBI."

Horowitz was found May 22 in a seaside resort in southern India and has been jailed since, awaiting deportation to the United States for traveling under a false British passport, Mattison said.

Horowitz was being held in a New Jersey jail awaiting his return to Schenectady County, N.Y., Mattison said Monday night.

Horowitz, 60, was convicted in Washington County Circuit Court 24 years ago of the sexual assault of two brothers, then ages 12 and 8, according to Herald-Mail reports in 1983.

At that time, he had a private practice on East Antietam Street and had been on staff at Brook Lane.

Horowitz was given a five-year suspended prison sentence for those offenses and ordered into a religious program in Monsey, N.Y., the Herald-Mail reported in 1983.

In November 1985, Horowitz left that religious community and studied in Brooklyn to become a rabbi. A short time later, he left for Israel, where he holds dual citizenship.

Schenectady police said Horowitz was under investigation in Israel, where he lived with a woman and her young children in the late 1980s, according to Herald-Mail reports in 1992.

In New York, Horowitz was sentenced to a minimum 10-year prison sentence in 1992 for the molestation of three boys and one girl at his Schenectady home, according to Herald-Mail reports.

According to the U.S. Marshals Service, Horowitz served 13 years for those crimes before he was paroled.

When Horowitz failed to appear for a meeting with his parole officer in 2006, Mattison said, that parole officer turned the case over to an absconder unit with which the U.S. Marshals cooperate in finding such offenders.

Mattison said a network of tipsters and extensive electronic surveillance was used to track Horowitz for 11 months internationally, leading to his location in southern India in late May.

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