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Athens Man Indicted Again, This Time For Putting Hit on Wife
By: Susan Tebben
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ATHENS — An Athens man already charged with the alleged kidnap of three children and the alleged rape of a woman is now charged with trying to intimidate her from his jail cell.
Neil M. Perin, 34, was indicted Monday in a superseding indictment — an indictment adding charges to a previously existing case — by an Athens County grand jury. Along with existing charges — two counts of domestic violence, two counts of abduction, six counts of kidnapping and one count each of disrupting public services and receiving stolen property — Perin was indicted on two counts of intimidation of an attorney, victim or witness in a criminal case. All of the charges are felonies other than one count of intimidation, which is a misdemeanor.
The new charges included in Monday’s indictment stem from a fellow inmate at the Southeastern Ohio Regional Jail reporting that Perin tried to arrange for the inmate to force the victim and others involved in the case to retract accusations against him, according to court documents. Also according to those documents, Perin allegedly told the inmate to kill his wife while making it look like a drug overdose.
“Perin was trying to have his wife change her testimony and alternatively make his wife unable to testify against him at trial,” a release from the prosecutor’s office on Monday stated.
He was originally indicted in June.
The original charges stemmed from an incident on April 24, in which he is accused of assaulting his wife and taking her children, ages 4, 2, and 1, during which he also allegedly changed the license plates on the vehicle he was driving, according to the Athens County Prosecutor’s Office. The incident triggered a statewide Amber Alert, and Perin was later taken into custody in Cleveland.
“The rape charge is due to forcing his wife to have sex with him on multiple occasions after she had been told by a doctor not to engage in sex,” Athens County Prosecutor Keller Blackburn stated in a previous press release. The prosecutor’s office also claims Perin was engaging in a pattern of abuse before the April incident.
In a previous case, Perin pleaded guilty to misdemeanor domestic violence in Athens County Municipal Court, and was fined, but given no jail time under the condition that he not commit any crimes in the next two years, and remove firearms from his home within 30 days of the guilty plea. In 2016, Perin was charged with domestic violence in municipal court, but the case was dismissed.