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Friday, October 26, 2007

[wvns] Woman gets 8 months for hate note

Woman gets 8 months in hate note case
By MARYCLAIRE DALE, Associated Press Writer
Wed Oct 24, 2007
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071025/ap_on_re_us/hotel_manager_threatened_1


PHILADELPHIA - A woman who sent her Arab-American boss a threatening
note that warned "Remember 9/11" and "You and your kids will pay" was
sentenced Wednesday to eight months in a federal halfway house.

Kia Reid, who described herself as Christian, donned gloves to craft
the note from magazine clippings and then left it in Nina Timani's
office, prosecutors said.

Timani said during a victim impact statement that she had spent months
wondering who sent the anonymous note and fearing that her two young
children would be harmed.

Timani said she was stunned when an FBI investigation led to the
35-year-old Reid, whom she had mentored and befriended during nine
years together at a Philadelphia hotel.

"How could you — when you have written that you want to tie my kids to
the fence — play with my daughter at a ... picnic?" Timani asked.

Reid said she sent the letter in anger, not in hatred, after she had
been unable to get help with a workplace dispute at the airport
Sheraton Suites Hotel.

"I thought all of the nonsense that was going on would stop," the
mother of three teenage children explained Wednesday to U.S. District
Judge Gene E.K. Pratter.

Reid did not detail the nature of the work dispute. The Philadelphia
woman was arrested in October 2006 after an FBI informant recorded her
discussing the note.

She later pleaded guilty to one count of sending a threatening hate
note, a misdemeanor.

The judge probed Reid's cultural attitudes at length before announcing
the sentence. Prosecutors had sought a one-year prison term.

Timani, a practicing Muslim born in Egypt, said she sought help from
the FBI over the objections of her husband. "I defied convention
because I had to know who was going to kill me and my kids," she said.

Timani said that her father, a California surgeon, could not fly after
the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks because he was mistakenly listed on
a no-fly list. Her brother took an American name to blend in after his
Dallas home was egged and stoned, she said.

"I came forward for my kids," she said. "I have found my inner peace
by helping spread tolerance to people of other faiths," she said.

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