A Silence of Mockingbirds (20 page)

T
he next day, during a fairly
routine grilling by defense attorneys, Sarah was asked about the diary she
kept and the statements she made to detectives following Karly’s death— those
statements where she had blamed David and defended Shawn, Sarah was asked
about the ever-perplexing hair braid incident. Then Demarest called Sarah
back to the stand.

Despite nearly two days of testimony from one of the last people to
see Karly alive, her own mother, nothing critical had been introduced
that would convince this jury Shawn Field was guilty. The jury hoped
the prosecution was going to connect the dots for them. Thus far, the
state had failed to give them anything concrete with which to convict
Shawn Field. Sarah’s testimony had only served to raise a lot of questions
about her own role in her daughter’s death.

Worried Sarah’s actions, or rather her inaction, could be problematic
for the prosecution, Demarest addressed that very matter with Sarah on
Friday, October 20, 2006, on redirect.

“If you were free to leave [Shawn] at any time, why didn’t you leave?”
Demarest asked.

Sarah tried to explain. She seemed weary, or perhaps medicated,
tired of being on the witness stand.

“I didn’t leave because Kate was there and I felt like she really
needed me. Shawn Field would lay a guilt trip on me. ‘How can you
leave Kate—she’s attached to you. You’re a good role model in her life.’

“I had grown to love Kate very much, and I still do,” Sarah
continued. “Shawn knew that and he would make me feel really guilty
about not being involved in her life anymore. He would say, ‘Then you
can’t see Kate anymore.’ Occasionally, he would randomly say, ‘I can
hire somebody to track you down. I’ll always know where you’re at.’”

Okay. Good. Demarest moved to the next question: “Up until
Karly’s death and after, did you still love Mr. Field?”

“I believed I did,” Sarah said.

Demarest asked Sarah to explain to the jury her mental state in the
first six days following Karly’s death.

“I don’t know if I could exactly describe what my thought process
was. If any of you get migraines…your head hurts so bad, everything
is fuzzy and painful. It was really difficult to imagine that my daughter
was dead. I had a hard time accepting that. I didn’t even know where
Shawn Field was the first few days.”

Sarah paused, sighed heavily, and paused again before continuing.
“So that first week was really hard to come to terms with losing my
daughter, obviously. It was the most painful, but there was also the loss
of other key people in my life. It just felt like one day I had a family and
then I didn’t. I had a hard time understanding. I just kind of shut down
for a while.”

Sarah may have been referring to her broken relationship
with her brother. In those early days after his niece’s murder, Doug Brill
told investigators, “I seriously thought that Sarah was going to get arrested.
I really did.” Police wanted to know why he would think that. “Sarah has a
really wicked temper,” Doug said. He thought perhaps she had just imploded
and accidentally killed Karly, or maybe she had left a bottle of Benadryl
within Karly’s reach. “Sarah just doesn’t think about future consequences,
or any sort of future. There’s no thought and she kind of feels like people
owe her things,” he said. Doug could not forgive his sister for Karly’s death.

Sarah’s friendship with Shelley Freeland had been strained prior to
Karly’s death; now it was history, as were most of the relationships she
had with coworkers and friends around town.

And despite the efforts of Gene and Carol Brill to reach out to their
daughter, Sarah repeatedly pushed her parents away, turning down
their invitations to join them for meals between court proceedings.
Police and others, who saw the tender way the Brills treated Sarah, were
annoyed when they would later hear her testify that her parents didn’t
support her.

Demarest asked Sarah if, when she went golfing on Wednesday
night, she had any idea Shawn Field was abusing her daughter. Clark Willes
jumped to his feet in objection. Field had not yet been found guilty. Judge
Holcomb sustained the objection and Demarest restated her question.

“When you left for golf on Wednesday, June 1, 2005, did you have
any idea Karly was being abused?”

Willes objected again and Holcomb granted the objection.

Joan Demarest was tired of playing around.

Yanking a black cloth from a huge poster-sized color photo of the
dead Karly, battered and bruised, on a cold postmortem table, Demarest
called out, “Sarah, did you do this to your daughter?”

Sarah began sobbing uncontrollably.

“Mrs. Sheehan, did you do this to your daughter?” Demarest fired
off her question again.

“No, I did not,” Sarah said through tears.

At the defense table, Clark Willes turned to Dan Koenig, and
whispered, loudly enough to be heard, “That was kind of mean.”

Dan Koenig answered, “It was more than mean. That’s what she
wanted.”

Sarah continued sobbing. Demarest told Judge Holcomb she had
no further questions. Demarest had issued a preemptive strike against
the defense by getting Sarah to break down before they could.

“Would you like a moment?” Willes asked Sarah. When Sarah failed
to answer, Willes walked back to the defense table and said to Koenig,
“I’ve never seen anything crueler in my whole life.”

Judge Holcomb recessed the jury. Some jurors were pretty distraught themselves. They were upset with Demarest.

“When she brought out that picture of Karly on the slab, it was
one of the lowest moments of the trial, quite frankly,” a juror said. “It
was cheesy theatrics. You could tell by the looks in everyone’s eyes, we
were all thinking, ‘What the hell was that?’ What was she trying to do?
Whipping out grand evidence, breaking down a witness. It’s like she was
saying, ‘Look at me, I’m a grand lawyer.’”

Even so, the very same juror admitted, “It was one of the few times
I actually pitied poor Sarah.”

Koenig had it right. Demarest’s actions elicited the response from
the jurors that Demarest had intended. They had been provoked to pity
Sarah, to see her as a victim.

It may have been the most important moment in the trial. “Showing
Sarah that postmortem photo of Karly was one of the most difficult
things I’ve done,” Demarest said. “I was not proud of it. I couldn’t look
the jurors in the eyes for the rest of the day. But I still believe it had
to happen. Sarah’s reaction was the most powerful moment: pure, raw,
devastated emotion.”

It was a made-for-TV moment. Up until then, Sarah displayed a flat
affect. She took long pauses and often seemed confused by questions.
Some observers felt she might be too heavily medicated. “Sarah had
been relatively stoic. The jury needed to see her with emotion,” Demarest
said.

Judge Holcomb was displeased with drama unfolding in her courtroom.

“She cleared the room and yelled at me for being so heartless
and cruel,” Demarest said. “I felt really bad but it had to be done. The
defense was trying to say Sarah had killed Karly, and her reaction made
it absolutely clear she couldn’t have.”

O
ver the course of a month, the jury heard from nearly
everyone in Karly’s life: father, mother, babysitter, doctors,
grandparents, state child protective services, and law enforcement
officials. Everyone except Shawn Field.

Shawn did not take the stand to testify, so the jury heard excerpts of
tapes from the prolonged police interviews made in the early hours and
days following Karly’s death.

In a voice that was measured, almost imperceptibly quiet at times,
Shawn explained to Detective Jason Harvey that Sarah left for work
around 11:30 that morning and called him at 1:37 p.m. to say she was
on her way home. Did he want her to bring home some frozen yogurt?
He’d said no. Shawn said he was holding Karly during the phone call and
that she was really tired. Before Sarah got home, he put her down for a
nap, gave her a compress for her eye, and covered her with a blanket.

“So she was already asleep by the time Sarah got in the house?”
Detective Harvey asked.

“Sarah didn’t go in there right away. We were talking about her
allergies and I was asking her what her dad said. I was asking about the
medicine because her dad had told her to get some eye thing, I don’t
know what.”

“What happened after that?”

“Sarah and I both walked in there, and I opened up the curtains.”

“Why did you guys walk in there?”

“Cause she wanted to see her and she wanted to say goodnight,
goodnight to her and so we walked in there. She was laying there and
Sarah ran over to her. She didn’t look right. We took the blanket away
and she was not breathing. I put my hand right here and she was not
breathing. And I don’t even remember who called 911.”

“So tell me about this injury to her eye,” Harvey said. “It looked
swollen to the officers.”

“Ha! It’s beyond swollen,” Shawn said. “It’s swollen shut.” Shawn
said it was allergies, aggravated by Karly rubbing it, poking it. “She had
that damn finger up there and she wouldn’t stop it.”

Detective Harvey repeatedly asked Shawn what happened that day.

Shawn repeated the story that Karly had allergies. That she was given a
little bit of Benadryl. That he put her down for a nap and Sarah found
her dead. He offered no explanation for how she ended up dead, other
than that he didn’t do it.

He told Detective Harvey he had been taking the photos to protect
Karly, to prove David was abusing her. Shawn said Sarah had been on
edge after suffering her second miscarriage, something no one knew
about except Shawn and Sarah. Shawn said Sarah had sent him to get
her a prescription for Vicodin. Vicodin and Percocet were Sarah’s drugs
of choice according to her medical charts, and Shawn said she had
“drawers full of it.”

“There were only two adults in this household, and there’s no way
that those bruises on Karly’s forehead would just appear,” Detective
Harvey said. “So did Sarah do this? Did she snap, did she just do it by
accident? What happened?”

“I haven’t ever seen Sarah get mad,” Shawn said. “I’ve seen her get
frustrated and just, you know, she always told me, ‘I don’t know how
to discipline Karly.’ She would tell me this all the time. And then she’d
compliment me, ‘You’re so good with Kate.’”

Harvey asked Shawn if he would have anything to add if he knew
Sarah was across the street with other detectives, talking about Shawn.

“I don’t know what she would ever say about me. I haven’t done
anything. I have never laid a hand on her, nothing,” Shawn whined.

“Karly basically dies in your care,” Harvey noted. “Something
happened at your house, Shawn—it happened there. She’s beaten and
she dies in your home.”

Repeatedly, during that first interview and subsequent ones,
Detective Harvey offered Shawn an opportunity to explain who killed
Karly. If not him, then who?

Only once has Shawn implicated someone else. Investigator John
Chilcote asked him, “Who hit Karly with the spoons and gave her the
bruises if you didn’t?”

“I guess Sarah did it. She did it,” Shawn said. “It’s hard for me to believe
that Sarah would hit Karly, but I guess Sarah did.”

Karly’s head injuries were such that she died within a couple of hours
of sustaining them. That’s what the experts, Dr. Chervenak and Dr.
Lewman, told the jurors. Dr. Larry Lewman, Oregon State Medical
Examiner’s Office, performed the autopsy on Karly, but it was Dr.
Carol Chervenak’s straight-talk explanation of Lewman’s findings that
pulled it all together for the jurors and finally gave them the factual
information they needed.

Her own explanation was aided by the Poser Model, a three-dimensional
graphic of Karly revealing all of the abrasions on her body,
from the bottoms of her feet to the top of her head. The computer-generated
graphic allowed the jurors to study the areas in question with
objectivity, a sorely needed component in a trial fraught with anger,
frustration, boredom, and despair.

Oregon Law states any child abuse case will be handled in a
multidisciplinary way; in other words, it will be staffed by police, child
protective workers, and child abuse experts. Dr. Chervenak was the
expert Matt Stark called when Karly was first referred for potential
child abuse to the state’s child protective services.

Karly was never seen by Dr. Carol Chervenak, the medical director
of the ABC House. The photos of the injuries Karly sustained in
December 2004 were never forwarded to Dr. Chervenak. That was Matt
Stark’s responsibility, but those photos, provided by David Sheehan,
were reportedly lost or stolen, and DHS investigators never asked for
replacements.

A computer graphic of Karly’s injuries helped get Shawn Field
convicted, but had Chervenak been provided with the same photos in
2004, photos that DHS had in their possession, Karly would probably
be alive today. Well trained in all areas of child abuse, Dr. Chervenak
would never have assumed Karly was injuring herself, and she would
have known someone was tormenting and abusing the child. She told
the jurors that had she seen the photos David provided, she would have
immediately identified the cause as child abuse.

In her nine years as Medical Director of the ABC House, Chervenak
said she had personally examined over 1,500 children and had testified
in over 200 cases of child abuse. She attended the autopsy of Karla
Isabelle Ruth Sheehan on June 5, 2005.

Using a pointer, Dr. Chervenak highlighted Karly’s injuries on the
graphic.

In addition to the ruptured eye and bruising on her head, there
were also bruises on her arms, both where the arm bends and on the
exterior surface. Her lip was cut in two places. She had bruises on her
calves and her groin, and her feet were badly bruised all over: tops,
bottoms, sides, and the middle of both feet.

“Once the head was shaved, more bruising was seen covering the
scalp—and actually, during the autopsy, underneath, inside of the scalp,
additional bruising was evident that you could not see on the skin,” Dr.
Chervenak said.

Demarest asked the doctor to explain how that happens.

“When there is blunt force contact to the scalp there is bruising
inside the scalp, but the blood has not had a chance to migrate to
the surface of the scalp so it’s not seen on the surface, but during the
autopsy.”

Child abuse experts look for patterns. Dr. Chervenak found a
pattern in the bruising on Karly’s back.

“There were four bruises together, similar in size.”

“What’s the significance of that pattern?” Demarest asked.

“That pattern has been documented in child abuse textbooks and
is consistent with an adult’s fist: the knuckles of a fist,” she explained.

“Is there any significance to the bruises on the underside of the
arms?” Demarest asked.

“It’s a location that is unusual to have accidentally injured,”
Chervenak said. “These are commonly known as protective wounds.
They come from a person who puts up their arms when they’re attacked.
Particularly, children will get into a defensive posture, almost a fetal
position.”

Demarest scanned the graphic so jurors could see Karly had bruises
on her ears. Pointing to them, Chervenak said, “Ears are very, very
rarely accidentally bruised. Less than half of one percent of the time in
children this age.”

And then there was the eye.

“The redness in the white part of the eye indicates that there was
very, very dense bleeding into the whites of the eye on the left,” she said.

Chervenak told the jury children Karly’s age rarely participate
in self-injurious behavior. That was something more common to
adolescents, not toddlers. “There’s no way Karly could have done these
things to herself,” Chervenak said.

“What caused Karly Sheehan’s death?” Demarest asked.

“Traumatic brain injury,” Dr. Chervernak said.

The most damning evidence against Shawn Field came from
his very own camera. He had told Detective Harvey he took photos
of Karly’s injuries. He’d even told Detective Harvey where to find the
camera. There were two very telling photos, one taken at 7:57 p.m. on
Thursday, June 2, 2005.

In the photos, Karly has a bruise on her forehead and another
around her left eye. Her eyes are watery, no doubt the result of tears.
Even so, she’s trying to smile. The next photo is dated at 1:21 p.m. on
June 3, 2005. It is the last photo of Karly alive. It was taken minutes
prior to Sarah arriving home. Karly’s left eye is swollen shut. There’s a
sheen to the skin, created by the cortisone Shawn told Detective Harvey
he’d been applying. Karly’s head is turned toward the camera, over her
left shoulder. She has a painful smile on her face, as if her abuser told
her to smile.

The reason that photo is so critical is because Karly was alive in
it. Demarest showed the photo to Dr. Chervenak, who explained that
Karly’s death had to have happened sometime between when Shawn
took that last photo at 1:22 p.m. and 2 p.m., when Sarah found her
daughter dead. Dr. Chervenak explained that the fatal injury could not
have occurred prior to that last photo being taken because in the photo
Karly is conscious: she is responsive, she is making eye contact, she is
upright, she is holding something, and she is responding emotionally.
The sort of fatal injury that caused Karly’s death would likely cause a
child to be immediately unconscious.

“Can you tell how long Karly survived after the injury that caused
her death?” Demarest asked.

“She had a short survival time after that fatal injury. Even if I didn’t
have that picture to look at, it would be clear that it was at least less than
two hours,” Chervenak said.

“Could striking a three-and-a-half-year-old who is 30 pounds, 38
inches tall with spoons have caused the fatal injury?” Demarest asked.

“Yes,” Dr. Chervenak said, “if those were directed at her head with
enough force. What happens is, when an impact hits the head, the head
starts in motion and at some point, it stops. It either stops because it
hits the chest or the child’s back, or the head hits a floor, or some other
object that’s in the room, and it stops abruptly. All it takes is enough
force generated and the head moves rapidly and stops rapidly, and the
energy from the force that hits the head goes into the brain, and causes
all that shearing and all that damage.”

It was Defense Attorney Dan Koenig who asked the question that
gave Chervenak the opportunity to make it clear for the jurors why they
should find Shawn W. Field guilty.

“Did you observe any damage to the brain itself?” Koenig asked
on cross-examination. Chervenak was at the autopsy, but she is not a
pathologist. The lawyer was aiming to trip her up.

“No. And that’s why we know she had a short survival time.”

Karly did not experience massive brain swelling, a natural result
of head trauma, because she didn’t live long enough for her system to
respond to the trauma, Chervenak explained.

“So there was no cellular damage to the brain that you observed?”
Koenig asked. The very question implied Chervenak lacked expertise.

“That’s right,” she answered with confidence. “And no one would
observe that, because Karly did not live long enough for that damage—
and this is where it gets very, very confusing, and that’s exactly why we
know she had a short survival time, because a person has to live two
hours to develop those cellular changes that we see on pathology. It’s a
vital reaction. And she did not die of massive brain swelling, either, so
we know she did not have delayed deterioration. We know that her fatal
injury occurred and she died shortly thereafter.”

When Dr. Chervenak spoke with clarity about Karly’s injuries
and the time sequence in which her death had occurred, it was the evidence
the jurors needed to convict Shawn Field, without a doubt, for the murder
of Karly Sheehan.

“It was excellent, clear testimony,” said a juror. “Looking at the
pictures, it was a clear case of obvious abuse.”

The evidence to convict Shawn Field, those photos, had been
provided by the defendant himself. “The timeline was so specific there
was only one person who could have killed Karly, and he was taking the
pictures,” said a juror.