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Allains together again for sentencing

They are to be punished this week for not showing up for their original trial date on abuse charges.

By MICHAEL KRUSE
Published July 11, 2006

BROOKSVILLE - Before the allegations and the arrests, before the 2½ months on the run and the matching guilty verdicts and 25-year state prison punishments, Lori Phillips Staab and Arthur "Tommy" Allain were married in February 1999 in a small ceremony on a cool, windy day on the beach at Pine Island. She had a long blond braid down her back. He wore a bolo tie.

The long, much-publicized story of the Allains should come to an end this week. They are scheduled to be sentenced Thursday on the charges of failing to appear last fall for their original trial date on child abuse charges. The punishment could be an additional five years.

It is a story mostly of incompetence and neglect. A sad story. Strange as it may sound, though, it's also always been a love story.

Tommy Allain's attorney wanted to file a motion to split the two cases and go to trial with his client alone. Tommy Allain, he thought, had the better chance for an acquittal, or at least a lesser measure of guilt in the minds of the jurors.

The husband wouldn't hear of it. Not even a little bit.

And now, say both the Allains' attorneys, he's paying the price.

"If I would've been able to sever, I really, truly believe the outcome would be different," Tommy Allain's state-appointed attorney, Elliott Ambrose of Brooksville, said late last week. "I think he saw this - I can't get inside his head - but I think he felt like it would be a betrayal if he allowed me to try his case separately.

"He was definitely loyal to her. He was most definitely loyal."

"I think he has a belief in her, and they have such a close bond," said Lori Allain's state-appointed attorney, Robert Christensen of Homosassa Springs. "He trusted her instincts."

"It defies logic," Ambrose said.

But who ever said love had anything to do with logic?

The Allains were arrested and charged with child abuse and neglect in June 2004.

They were accused of keeping a 10-year-old girl in their state-approved, long-term, nonrelative care in a locked room in the rear of their double-wide mobile home north of Weeki Wachee and starving her down to 29 pounds.

Then they skipped the start of their trial in October and were on the lam until they were arrested in January at a Quality Inn in New Jersey.

They were brought back to Florida and held separately at the Hernando County Jail.

Everything else, though, they were going to do as one.

"One of us goes down," Tommy Allain said in early January in one of a series of phone calls with the St. Petersburg Times when they were still on the loose, "both of us go down."

No severing. No way.

"That's one thing they were adamant about," Christensen said. "They were in this together."

"We're married, for richer or poorer, the whole nine yards," Tommy Allain said in an interview in February at the jail. "For eternal life, the way I look at it."

Tommy Allain moved to Florida from Michigan in his teens. He's been a long-line fisherman and a truck driver.

Lori Allain moved here from New Jersey in her 20s. She's been on disability since 1991 for injuries suffered in a motorcycle accident she says she had in 1977.

They met at a bar in Pinellas County almost 20 years ago.

"I fell in love with her the first time I saw her," Tommy Allain said in another interview at the jail earlier this year. "It was like ... bang ... one of those things. Butterflies fluttering in my chest."

She's brash and loud, and he's a good bit more quiet - opposites attract, they say - but they both balk at authority and are fiercely loyal to their immediate family. Their four teenage boys. Two daughters from her previous marriage.

Each other.

Lori Allain had a request for a reporter at the end of an interview in February at the jail.

"Will you do me a favor?" she asked.

"Tell Tommy I said I love him," she said.

In March, during their trial, Ambrose still tried to separate the two cases as much as possible. Tommy Allain, he told jurors, over and over, was not the primary caregiver, and was not home nearly as much because he was at work, and was not as responsible as his wife for the near-death state of the starving girl.

"I've said it before, I'll say it again," he said in his closing argument. "I do not represent Lori Allain."

But when the Allains stood as the court clerk read out loud the guilty verdicts, chains shackled them to the floor - and to each other.

"I think it could've ended differently for Tommy," said Christensen, Lori Allain's attorney.

"But he decided very early on to go to trial with her," Ambrose said. "I was never able to convince him otherwise. He was getting irritated with me for bringing it up so much. That's how many times I brought it up with him.

"It came out of his devotion to her," he said, "but I think he probably compromised his own interests."

But in a way, it was suggested to him, that's what love is all about.

Right?

There was a pause.

"Twenty-five years, man," Ambrose said. "Twenty-five years."

Michael Kruse can be reached at mkruse@sptimes.com or 352 848-1434.

[Last modified July 10, 2006, 19:28:17]