ASHEVILLE - After a lengthy trial, former Buncombe County Deputy Matthew Lund and his wife Aimee Lund have beaten almost all the charges they faced in a child abuse case.
They were found guilty of contributing to the delinquency of one child, and innocent in a slew of other charges.
They faced eight charges for allegedly contributing to the delinquency of minors and abusing those children. All the charges were misdemeanors.
Matthew Lund, 37, will be placed on unsupervised probation for one year. Aimee Lund, 40, will be on supervised probation until she pays a $100 fine and court costs. Once that is paid, her probation will be unsupervised.
“I don’t know what to monitor,” District Court Judge Patricia Young said during sentencing, when discussing whether the probation should be supervised or unsupervised. The child tied to that charge is no longer in the Lunds’ care.
Ted Besen, the attorney who represented Matthew Lund, said that a supervised probation could threaten Lunds' status with the National Guard. He also works at Microtech Knives, Besen said during sentencing.
The Lunds were accused of locking children in bedrooms; restricting their access to food, water and a bathroom; forcing one child to sleep in a tent and nailing bedroom windows shut.
During closing statements, defense attorneys Besen and Catherine Perez said that there was no testimony of physical injury to any child or of the children being malnourished, among other things.
‘They knew it was wrong’
Young moved quickly through most of the charges, but spent more time explaining her reasoning behind verdicts involving the child that led to the sole conviction.
That child was allegedly forced to sleep in a tent fitted with zip ties and punished for bathroom troubles that sometimes ended with urine and feces on a bedroom floor. The tent was purchased by Aimee Lund, according to testimony. Testimony varied on why it was purchased — either for a form of therapy, to separate the child after they inappropriately touched a sibling or to prevent nighttime food binges.
The situation had created an environment destructive to the family, and it was apparent that it was difficult to manage, Young said. She believed that locks placed on a bedroom door were likely to protect that child and others in the house.
But punishments switched from being "corrective" to "punitive" as the Lunds' frustrations mounted, she said.
The child was punished by being whipped with a belt after "using the bathroom" in a bowl, for example.
Young believed that the Lunds knew they "crossed a line" in their handling of issues with that child in particular.
She said that the tent idea was probably born from good intentions, but that it constituted a "grossly inappropriate procedure" — a legal guideline that must be met for conviction in a contributing to the delinquency of a minor charge.
“They knew it was wrong,” prosecutor Blythe McCoy said of the tent during her closing statement, noting that different accounts of whether it was used or even purchased were given by Aimee Lund to different agencies.
“Thank God we are only here on misdemeanor charges,” McCoy said, noting that the situation could have been worse if there were a house fire or some other emergency.
But Young stopped short of finding the Lunds guilty of abusing that child, or any other, and agreed with defense attorneys’ arguments that there was a difference between an immediate, real threat to safety and a hypothetical one.
'Risk' or 'substantial risk'?
That point was brought up by Besen and Perez.
"There's a big difference between a substantial risk of harm and a risk of harm," Besen said during closing statements.
Throughout the five-day trial, the two attorneys painted a picture of the Lunds having to deal with difficult children who, at times, they did not know how to care for. The Lunds were provided few resources to know how to care for a special needs child, they said.
“There are things that the Lunds could have done differently,” but that is not the same as violating North Carolina law, Perez said during her closing statements.
There was no evidence of “substantial risk” to the children, Perez and Besen said.
Perez said that the distinction would be a tangible, real risk.
During his closing statement, Besen said the child kept in a tent was a risk to other family members. Allowing that child to “roam” the house at night would have been dangerous, Besen said. It was necessary to “contain” the child. There were “serious issues” where the Lunds were “trying to protect everyone else in the house.”
“It’s a tough case where the Lunds are trying to balance everything out,” he said.
He made a similar point during sentencing, which Young took objection to.
“I don’t like that term,” she said of Besen’s reference to “problems caused” by the child.
After Besen unsuccessfully motioned to have the courtroom closed to the public on the second day of trial, the Citizen Times agreed to an arrangement with Judge Young to ensure certain details from the trial would not be published. The Citizen Times is abiding by that agreement.
Perez and Besen declined to comment at the end of the trial.
