Port Jervis man given life sentence in murder case

Goshen — Orange County District Attorney David M. Hoovler announced that on May 4, 2016, Dennis McBee, 30, of Port Jervis, was sentenced following his March 24, 2016, conviction by a jury in connection with the murder of an elderly Port Jervis shop owner.
Orange County Court Judge Nicholas De Rosa sentenced McBee to the maximum sentence allowed by law, 25 years to life in prison for murder in the second degree, and one and one-third to four years for tampering with physical evidence, those sentences to be served consecutively, and to be served concurrently with the sentences for several other charges.
Prosecutors had established that on November 7, 2014, McBee entered Kucher’s Shoe Repair and Orthopedic on Front Street in Port Jervis, where he beat, stomped on, and robbed the store’s proprietor, 77-year-old Josef Kucher, who later died from injuries that McBee had inflicted on him.
In addition to beating Kucher and stealing money from the store’s cash register, McBee tried to conceal evidence of his crimes, in the form of the bloody pants and boots that he had been wearing at the time of the beating. Following the murder, McBee fled to Wilkes-Barre, where he was ultimately apprehended and extradited to New York.
Kucher had been a Port Jervis shoemaker for 40 years, and was an Austrian immigrant, military veteran, and a prominent figure in the Port Jervis community.
Hoovler thanked the Port Jervis Police Department, the New York State Police, and the City of Middletown Police Department for their cooperative efforts in the investigation of the case. In addition, Hoovler thanked the City of Wilkes-Barre Police Department for their invaluable assistance in apprehending McBee.
“This defendant’s brutal and senseless crime has been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” said Hoovler, “resulting in the most severe sentence that New York law allows under the circumstances. Unfortunately, that sentence cannot nearly make up for the loss of Mr. Kucher to the Port Jervis community. To work hard your entire life and be an upstanding member of your community, only to have your life ended by a vicious individual intent on stealing your money, well, that demands justice, and we have seen justice done as far as we can. We will continue to work closely with our law enforcement officers and our communities to improve conditions throughout the county, so that, hopefully, we can put an end to this kind of useless violence.”
District Attorney Hoovler highly commended Assistant District Attorney Christopher Kelly and Senior Assistant District Attorney David Byrne, who prosecuted the case.