Husband gets life in slaying of teacher

CAMBRIDGE -- Sitting in the witness stand just steps away from Damion Linton, her shackled son-in-law, Shirley Harvey compared the 26-year-old to a scorpion, one who accepted acts of kindness from her daughter but in the end killed Andrea Harvey.

''You played on her vunerabilities," Harvey said, her voice trembling with emotion as she delivered an impact statement yesterday afternoon in Middlesex Superior Court. ''Our daughter had never dealt with a scorpion."

''When he put his hands around her beautiful, slender neck and squeezed and squeezed until the bones broke and her eyes begged for life, his hands were on my neck, choking me too," Harvey said. Linton, dressed in a black suit and wearing tortoise-shell glasses with his dreadlocks in a ponytail, sat motionless throughout her statement.

Moments after she and other relatives spoke, Superior Court Judge Peter Lauriat sentenced Linton to life in prison without parole. Earlier in the day, a jury found Linton guilty of first-degree murder.

Family members say Linton first met Andrea Harvey while she was on vacation in Jamaica about a decade ago and he pursued her relentlessly. She visited the island, her mother's homeland, often. Even though they lived about 1,700 miles apart, Linton often called her, and Harvey, a popular math teacher at East Boston High School, grew to love him. In 2003 she paid for his plane ticket to Boston. Five months later, in early 2004, they were married.

But a year later, on Feb. 23, 2005, Linton strangled Harvey, 28, after she confronted him about his marital infidelity, police and prosecutors said.

Investigators said that a woman Linton was secretly dating would come for early-morning trysts in the East Cambridge condominium he shared with his wife. But according to investigators, the woman showed up one morning last year while Harvey was at home. When the woman rang the apartment doorbell, Linton answered and quickly went outside, investigators said.

They said Harvey was only looking to retrieve her cellphone from her husband when she stumbled upon the couple talking in the woman's car.

Harvey's body was discovered in the condo the next day by her parents.

Linton almost immediately became a suspect. There were no signs of forced entry, and the condo door was locked.

Yesterday, Andrea Harvey was remembered as a woman who challenged those around her.

''She had a special talent at getting at-risk students to appreciate math," said Mike Rubin, headmaster at East Boston High School, where Harvey taught for five years. He and several teachers attended the sentencing yesterday.