A daily double of infamy

For the most part, Thornbury Township is a sleepy little community in the booming western edge of Delaware County.

It’s the home of Cheyney University and the county prison.

It does not often find itself – or its citizens – splattered all over the front page.

So you can imagine just how odd today must seem in that little burg.

The township is dealing with the glare of not one, but two big stories, neither of which will exactly add to the Currier & Ives postcard image of the place.

A brutal strangulation murder that occurred in a township residence is playing out in a Media courtroom. The lurid details of the case likely will keep Thornbury in the headlines all week.

Ironicially, the same day the murder trial of William Smithson started, the former Thornbury Township treasurer was in another courtroom in the same building to enter a guilty plea to ripping off the township to the tune of more than $230,000.

Deborah Perry, a longtime trusted employee, was sentenced to three to six years in prison. She also will have to repay the township the entire amount she stole, as well as the cost of the investigation of the township books after authorities got tipped off to what she was doing.

Police say that Perry, over a span of about six years, was basically using township funds as her own bank account.

No doubt this daily double gives a false, and incomplete picture of the township.

Eventually things will return to normal, and the township will once again operate for the most part in blissful anonymity.

What happened in those two Media courtrooms yesterday was anything but what usually happens in Thornbury.

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