Indiana Township woman who killed FBI agent seeks compassionate release after contracting coronavirus | TribLIVE.com
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Indiana Township woman who killed FBI agent seeks compassionate release after contracting coronavirus

Paula Reed Ward
| Friday, August 21, 2020 4:44 p.m.
Christina Korbe

The woman who shot and killed an FBI agent as he attempted to serve an arrest warrant at her home in Indiana Township in 2008 is asking for compassionate release from prison because she is still recovering from a covid-19 infection.

Christina Korbe, who is serving a 15-year sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Conn., is scheduled for release on May 18, 2022.

Korbe was charged with killing Special Agent Samuel Hicks the morning of Nov. 19, 2008, as he and a team of law enforcement officers arrived to arrest her husband, Robert Korbe, on drug charges at their Woods Run Road home.

Hicks, who breached the front door, was wearing a bulletproof vest, but the shot, fired by Korbe from the second floor and down the dark stairwell, struck him and entered his chest.

Korbe said that she thought someone was breaking into their home, and she fired the shot for protection.

She pleaded guilty in 2011 to voluntary manslaughter and a firearms charge.

Korbe contracted covid-19 in March, five days after her roommate was quarantined, according to the request for release filed Thursday.

The document says Korbe was ordered to strip her roommate’s bedding, bag it and put it in the trash, and on March 29, she started having coughing, nausea and body aches. Korbe lost her sense of taste and smell and had a headache for 31 days.

On April 13, she wrote the prison’s warden and requested home confinement for the rest of her sentence, but no action was ever taken.

According to the filing in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, almost 10% of federal inmates have contracted the virus, and 113 have died from it.

“And there is, as yet, no guarantee that a person develops full immunity after recovery,” wrote her attorney, W. Theodore Koch III.

Citing the “First Step Act,” he said that the court can reduce a prison sentence for “extraordinary and compelling reasons.”

“Ms. Korbe clearly is not a danger to the community,” he said. “Moreover, the fact that she has survived the virus once, and persists in her desire to remain healthy despite the myriad health challenges noted in her medical records, there are extraordinary and compelling reasons to allow her to be released at this time.”

Since her imprisonment, her lawyer wrote, Korbe has taken advantage of various programs offered, including serving in the chaplain support services apprenticeship and as a trained suicide companion, in which she monitors potentially suicidal inmates.

She has taken classes through Yale Theology and creative writing classes through West Virginia University, and participated in a “scared straight” video for teenage girls.

She also serves as a hospice volunteer, her attorney wrote.

In addition, the filing says that her mother has had three strokes, and her father died from cancer.

Her children, it continued, are teenagers and live with her father-in-law, where she, too, would reside if released.

The filing notes that she is eligible for release to a halfway house in less than one year.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s office said they had no comment on Korbe’s request.

Hicks was 33 at the time of his death. The Westmoreland County native wrote in his yearbook at Southmoreland High School, where he graduated in 1993, that he planned a career in law enforcement.

Korbe’s husband, Robert Korbe, is serving 29 years in federal prison. He pleaded guilty in May 2011 to drug charges and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. In June, he pleaded guilty to conspiring to sell synthetic cannabinoids at the Federal Correctional Institution at Loretto between 2017 and 2019.

He was ordered to serve an additional four years in prison.


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