A Schuylkill County judge called a coal company owner and his estranged wife “childish” and “immature” Monday before clearing the man of threatening her and finding him guilty of harassment.
“He needs to walk away,” Judge Christopher Hobbs said, addressing John Rothermel and everyone involved in the non-jury trial. “He needs to be a man for his children.”
Hobbs found Rothermel, 39, guilty of a summary count of harassment and ordered him to pay a $300 fine plus costs. He found him not guilty of a misdemeanor count of terroristic threats. Both charges stemmed from a December 2025 confrontation with his wife, Alexis, outside a home he rented in West Brunswick Township.
Hobbs said the defense raised reasonable doubt on the threats charge.
First Assistant District Attorney Mike Stine prosecuted the case. Rothermel was represented by Jay Nigrini, of Reading.
Rothermel owns several businesses, among them RS&W Coal Company. The couple were splitting up at the time. He’d moved out of their marital home outside Pine Grove in July 2025, and in November, she testified, he told her by text message that he was done trying to reconcile.
Alexis Rothermel testified that her husband attacked her when she stopped at his rented home on her way to work to drop off one of their children.
In the weeks leading up to that morning, she said, he was messaging her at a 10-to-1 ratio. In one message, she said, he wrote cryptically, “To death do us part.” She said she brushed it off at the time, believing he was angry because he thought she’d been with someone new.
When she arrived with their child, she said, she also brought two boxes of his belongings, including computer parts and a box of Factor meals. That’s when, she said, he pushed her into the back of her Jeep and started yelling.
“Where were you last night? Who’s the guy,” she recalled him demanding.
She testified that he then grabbed her along her jawline, and that he was “calm and steady, very steady … not irate” as he did it.
She said it continued in the driveway, with him grabbing her arms and keeping her from reaching her phone inside the vehicle as he kept questioning her about another man.
“If you think this is bad, wait ’til you see what I do to him,” she recalled him saying. It was then, she said, that he told her he would get a gun, shove it in her throat and bury her in the woods where no one would find her.
“I thought, this was it. This is where it ends,” she testified. Under cross-examination by Nigrini, she said she’d been faithful during the marriage.
She said he then hugged her and said, “See you at Christmas,” followed by, “Don’t get hit by a tractor-trailer … or do.”
She said she drove off and pulled into the driveway of a nearby Christmas tree farm, where she called 911. While she waited for State Police, she said, her husband texted to ask what medicine their child needed for an earache. She told him Tylenol. Then, she said, he drove past the farm while troopers were with her, and she pointed him out.
Trooper Joseph Oliver testified that police stopped Rothermel’s vehicle and arrested him. He said he didn’t see any injuries on Alexis Rothermel, and no photos were taken that day. She testified that bruises showed up several days later and submitted photos taken by an employee at the Klingerstown Country Inn, a restaurant she owns.
Oliver said that while in custody, Rothermel told police that whatever his wife said never happened.
The defense case Hobbs pointed to included testimony from Rothermel’s stepson, Jeremiah Umbenhauer, who works for the coal company.
Umbenhauer testified that his mother once threatened to get Rothermel in trouble so he’d lose his dynamite license, which would make it impossible for him to run the coal company. He said she made the threat while intoxicated, on a night in September 2025 when he and his half-siblings were with Rothermel at the Gratz Fair and she had gone elsewhere. He said he had to leave the fair to pick her up at a bar.
He testified that his mother also said she was “going to take everything he has” and was “going to take it all.”
“I heard that very clearly,” he said.
Rothermel testified in his own defense that the marriage became irreparable after his wife invested in the Klingerstown Country Inn, which was part of his family’s businesses.
“She chose this place over her family. She got sucked into this trap. It’s depressing,” he said.
He said that when she accused him of infidelity in July 2025, she slapped him in the face and a laundry basket was thrown onto his vehicle. Worried the accusations would hurt his businesses, he said, he moved out the next day. He said she threatened that she would “get” him.
As for the December confrontation, Rothermel admitted pushing his wife but said she pushed him, too. He didn’t recall who pushed first.
“Alexis always pushes,” he said. “I pushed her off me.”
He denied grabbing her by the jaw or threatening her with a gun.
He said he turned around after seeing her with police because he was worried about getting in trouble for leaving their child home alone while he went to get the medicine.
In his closing, Stine said Alexis Rothermel “is able to recall specific details,” while her husband “gave sort of a general idea of what happened.”
Stine also addressed the defense’s attempt to discredit her with a text message she sent her husband the night before the driveway confrontation. In it, she wrote that she was at the restaurant, had gotten into a fight with a former business partner of his and wanted to “slit her throat with a God damn bottle.”
Nigrini told Hobbs that domestic cases “are a challenge” and that in this one, “Each side has vested interest.”
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