A citizen has railed against a judge and prosecutor involved in the case of a woman left to die after falling from a golf cart in The Villages.
Timothy Jacob Foxworth, 38, last month in Sumter County Court, was sentenced to one year of probation and 50 hours of community service in a 2017 incident which claimed the life of 51-year-old Shelly Osterhout.
Osterhout’s son said the sentence “stinks” and her father found it incomprehensible that he was told by a member of the prosecutor’s office that Foxworth’s family had “deep pockets” and getting a conviction would be difficult.
Now a Stonecrester has weighed in with a letter to the court, calling the judge, prosecutor and defense attorney “abusers.”
“I am so very sorry for the death of Shelly Osterhout and for the life of Timothy Foxworth. As a daughter, sister, wife, mother and grandmother, I am heartbroken at the lack of justice in this case,” she wrote in the letter, which is on file with the Sumter County Clerk of Court’s Office.
She had a special message for Judge William Hallman III, Assistant State Attorney William Catto and Foxworth’s defense attorney Andrew Moses.
“It is my hope that as you look into the faces of your grandmothers, mothers, wives, daughters and granddaughters, you see the face of a woman who was left to die in the road,” she wrote.
Farwell suggested Foxworth may have benefitted from white male privilege.
“If the driver had been another woman or a man of color, this case would have ended with at least a jail term for Foxworth,” wrote Farwell, who has no known link to to the case.
“It is also despicable how power and money influenced this decision. May you remember your role in the travesty every time you see yourself in the mirror. I am sorry that you men are in positions of power – because you are abusers,” Farwell said in the letter.
Foxworth was accompanied May 20 to court by his father, Roger Foxworth, who sold his Village of Gilchrist home and moved to North Carolina after his son’s arrest.
Father and son had been drinking together at City Fire at Brownwood on that fateful night in 2017 when the younger Foxworth met Osterhout, who was visiting The Villages from Fort Myers. They left together in his parents’ golf cart from which she fell, suffering the fatal head injury. Foxworth told police he “panicked,” dragged her body into a flower bed and drove away. She was discovered by Good Samaritans who called for an ambulance. She later died at Ocala Regional Medical Center.
