KARLY SHEEHAN: True Crime behind Karly's Law

by Karen Spears Zacharias

  Bloody hell, he thought as he kissed Karly goodbye.

  On Friday, June 3, 2005, David was at work when he got the call from Gene Brill. It was 2:45 p.m.

  “Sarah just called,” Gene said. “Karly’s in the emergency room.”

  David went to his supervisor and told her he needed to leave immediately. He tried not to worry. Doesn’t every kid wind up in the emergency room at one time or another? And besides, David told himself, he had just heard from her that very morning.

  Sarah had called around ten o’clock. David’s phone was on vibrate, as was his habit while working, so he’d missed the call, but Karly left a message.

  “Hi Daddy,” Karly said. “I miss you. I love you.”

  It was the last thing Karly would ever say to her father. He not only missed the call, he’d erased it after he heard it.

  David put his car in reverse and nearly hit a Hillsboro Police Department squad car in his rush. Taking a deep breath, David paused to compose himself. Karly is in good hands, he reminded himself. You still have at least an hour and a half of driving to do. Don’t end up in the emergency room yourself, or you’ll be no help to her.

  Once he was on the highway, David called Sarah’s cell. He got her voice mail.

  “Sarah, I am Karly’s father. If there’s something wrong with her, I have the right to know. Why didn’t you call and tell me she’s in the hospital? Call me ASAP!”

  It was the last thing he would say to Sarah in the coming weeks.

  As he headed south on Interstate 5, David called Gene back.

  “Have you heard anything more?”

  “I haven’t,” Gene said. “But Sarah did say Karly wasn’t breathing when she was admitted to the ER.”

  “Okay,” David said. He took a deep breath and gripped the steering wheel. “I’m going to call the hospital. See what I can find out.”

  At 3:30 p.m., just a tad north of the Wilsonville exit, still about sixty-five miles north of Corvallis, David received a phone call from a man who identified himself as an emergency room doctor. Dr. Hochfeld didn’t waste any breath making small talk.

  “Your daughter was admitted to the ER this afternoon. She was not breathing. I am sorry. We did everything we could. Karly is dead,” he said.

  “No! No! No!” David cried out.

  Hours earlier on that Friday morning, Sarah had called Gene Brill and told him that Karly had woken up with a badly swollen eye. Gene and Carol were at Oregon Health Sciences University Hospital in Portland, where Carol was being treated for ongoing health problems. Gene recalled later that Sarah sounded very distressed.

  “Dad, Karly’s eye is swollen and all she wants to do is sleep. Can allergies do that? Make a person sleepy that way?” Sarah asked.

  “Yes, Sarah,” he said. “Eyes can be affected by allergies. They can turn red. Sometimes there’s swelling. Sometimes they get runny.” He reminded Sarah that sometimes her sister’s son got allergies, especially during the spring growing season.

  “Kim gives her boy Benadryl. You might try that. Why don’t you call Kim?” Gene suggested. “Ask her about it.”

  Sarah asked Karly if she wanted to talk.

  “Grandpa! Grandpa!” Karly cried. “My eye hurts. My eye hurts.”

  “I know, honey. Your momma told me. I’m so sorry.”

  “Is Grandma sick?” Karly asked. “Are the doctors fixing her?”

  “Yes, honey. They are fixing her all up. I’ll tell her you called, and we’ll see you soon, okay?”

  “Okay,” Karly said, handing the phone back to her mother.

  Gene was disconcerted by Karly’s cries. His granddaughter seemed to be in a great deal of pain, but he couldn’t see what Sarah saw, what the police, EMTs, nurses, and doctors would later see—what made them believe this little girl had been beaten to death. Karly’s eye was swollen shut. The eyeball was ruptured. She looked like a boxer who’d lost the fight.

  •

  David kept driving through his tears and anguish. He did not try to call Sarah. He did not want to speak to her. Instead, he called his girlfriend Kendall and told her that Karly was dead.

  He asked Kendall to call his sister Andrea in Ireland, but not to tell her anything.

  “Just tell her to call me ASAP, please,” David said.

  It was late in Ireland. The family had gathered at Castletownbere to celebrate a wedding. David and Karly couldn’t be there with the rest of the family, but they had a trip booked for later in August. Karly had started packing her suitcase already. A week or two before, in a phone call, Karly had serenaded her Auntie Andrea. She sang “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” the song her daddy had taught her the previous summer when they were preparing for their last trip to Ireland.

  Shortly after midnight, Jason, David’s brother, asked Andrea to check for messages on her phone from a U.S. number. Kendall had left a message, instructing Andrea to call David as soon as possible.

  Andrea and Jason left the reception, stood in the hallway, and called David.

  “David,” Andrea hesitated. “What’s wrong?”

  “Where are you?” David asked.

  “I’m at the wedding,” Andrea said, “with the rest of the family. Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Karly’s dead,” David cried.

  Andrea dropped to her knees. Jason dropped down beside her. Everything went hazy for them both. She assured David that she would tell their mom and dad. But after she hung up, Andrea had a sense that none of it had really happened. Not the phone call. Not the death.

  Perhaps the universe was playing some horrific hoax. Surely, she had misheard David. Or he had misspoken. There was no way Karly could be dead.

  So unsure was she that Andrea rang her brother back.

  “David, how do you know Karly’s dead? She can’t be dead! Are you sure?”

  “As sure as I can be,” David replied. “That’s what the doctor just told me.”

  David’s parents, James and Noreen Sheehan, were on the dance floor swaying to a slow song. Noreen had been facing the door when Jason had first come to get Andrea. She’d watched the two of them leave together. There was something about the way they were walking, an urgency to it that bothered Noreen.

  “James, there’s something wrong,” she said. “Maybe something’s wrong with one of the grandkids.” The couple held their spot on the dance floor facing the door, waiting, watching, expecting.

  Andrea was soon back, making her way across the crowded dance floor. When she reached her parents, Andrea took them both by the hand and led them outside.

  “What’s wrong?” Noreen asked first, then James. “Andrea, what’s wrong?”

  They kept repeating their question, but Andrea would not answer them. She wanted to get them as far away from the wedding reception as possible. Once outside, Andrea spoke as plainly as she could.

  “Karly is dead!” she cried.

  “Andrea! Don’t say things like that!” Noreen scolded. But then she saw the darkness in her daughter’s eyes. “Oh my God!” she cried. “Why? How?”

  But Andrea didn’t know why or how. Jason was kneeling on the ground, weeping. They all were weeping.

  “We’ve got to get home,” Noreen said. She turned to her husband. “We all have to get home. Right now! I need to talk to David.”

  A friend took them to the hotel, where they picked up their bags, and then drove them the thirty miles home to County Kerry.

  “We were very anxious to get home,” Noreen said. “David was going to ring us when he had information for us. At that stage, we had no details as to what had happened. Unfortunately, we had a fair idea that Sarah was involved.”

  Nearly all of Andrea’s childhood memories include David. The two, who were born only a year apart, were as close as any siblings could be. They spent nearly every weekend with their own grandparents. In the mornings, David would tag along with their grandfather and Andrea along with their grandmother. In the afternoons, the two siblings would go off frogging.

>   “We would spend hours playing in the field, climbing into drains with old tin cans and catching frogs and putting them into a barrel,” Andrea recalled “Our record was about fifteen frogs. We were very proud!”

  As they grew older, David took pride in looking after his younger sister. When she was in her final year of college and pregnant with her daughter, Chantelle, Andrea developed a kidney infection.

  “I didn’t want to ring Mom and Dad as I was afraid that they would worry, and also I didn’t want to put them under pressure financially as there were three of us in college that year, which can’t have been easy,” Andrea said. “So I rang David, who told me to get myself to a doctor, and that he would send down money for me. A check arrived in the post the following day.”

  Now her big brother was across a wide ocean from her, desperately hurt, and there was nothing Andrea, or anyone else, could do to bring Karly back.

  Still driving south on I-5, David called his friend John Hogan. There were a million scenarios running through his head, but David was trying his best to stay focused as he told John what little he knew.

  “John, when I get there, I don’t want to see that prick Field,” David said.

  John was waiting at Good Samaritan Hospital when David pulled into the parking lot. Before getting out of the car, David dropped his head to the steering wheel and prayed for strength.

  David felt lead-footed entering the ER. John embraced him and handed him a bottle of water. His priest, Father John Mitchell from St. Mary’s Catholic Church, was there as well. They spoke briefly before Detective Karin Stauder and Detective Shawn Houck showed up to interview David.

  Three hours and a penile swab later, when David finally emerged, John Hogan was still there. Despite the warmth of that June day, David felt a chill deeper than any he’d ever known.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Karla Ruth Sheehan was declared dead by Dr. Paul Hochfeld, the attending emergency room physician, at 2:20 p.m. on Friday, June 3.

  Detective Mike Wells was at his desk tending to paperwork that afternoon when his cell phone buzzed. He turned it over, looked at the incoming number. It was Jason Harvey. Wells flipped the phone open.

  “Mike?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Maclean needs some help on a death investigation out on Aspen. I’m going out there. You want me to swing by and get you?”

  “What kind of death?” Wells asked.

  “A kid.”

  Wells had been with Corvallis Police Department nearly ten years, but he’d only been a detective for the past few months. Wells is a handsome man, with a runner’s frame. He keeps his brown hair clipped in military style. He is deliberate man—some would say calculating. He’s a thinker, but he’s no diplomat. Wells says what he thinks, plainly and frankly. He’s a take-charge, help-or-get-out-of-my-way kind of guy.

  Harvey, by contrast, is a broad-chested fellow with a slow smile and an intimidating presence to those on the wrong side of the law. Harvey prefers the company of dogs to people.

  Wells was still gathering up equipment—baggies, tape, swab kits, gloves, video equipment—when Harvey showed up a few minutes later. The two men loaded all the stuff they’d need to collect evidence into the back of Harvey’s patrol car.

  Picking up the radio handset, Wells called dispatch.

  “What’s the address of the death investigation that Maclean is on?”

  “2652 NW Aspen Street.”

  “What do you know about it?”

  “A child stopped breathing. Fire crew is there now.”

  Medics were loading a gurney into the ambulance when the two officers arrived. The emergency crew sped away with lights and siren blaring before the two men got out of their car.

  Sergeant Fieman walked over to greet the detectives.

  “Poor girl’s been beat, beat bad,” Fieman said. The veteran cop was visibly shaken.

  “How old is she?” Harvey asked.

  “Three,” Fieman replied. “She wasn’t breathing. Didn’t have a pulse. I don’t think she’s gonna make it.” He shook his head the way disbelieving people do. “I know her momma. Sarah Sheehan. Fire crew took her to the hospital. Her boyfriend, Shawn Field, is inside the house. Officer Teeter’s with him.”

  “Wells, why don’t you head on over to the hospital? Monitor the mom and kid,” Harvey said. “I’ve got a couple of questions I’d like to ask the mom’s boyfriend.”

  Wells located Officer Maclean in the emergency room. He had a box camera and was taking photos of the little girl.

  “We’ll do an autopsy to confirm it, but it appears she died of blunt force trauma,” Dr. Hochfeld advised Detective Wells. “Her mom’s in the waiting room. You want to come with me while I tell her?”

  The two men walked the hospital hallway, heads down and somber, to a private waiting room where Sarah Brill Sheehan waited with her roommate, “Auntie” Shelley Freeland.

  Shelley was sitting on the couch. She saw the men enter before Sarah did. With her back to the door, Sarah was kneeling on the floor in front of Shelley. The two women had weathered ten years of friendship, often strained by the fraying of financial or moral cords. They grasped at each other. Their hands entwined, they prayed and wept like the sisters of Lazarus, wailing for God’s intervention. The two of them had made untidy promises, the way they had a thousand times before. They promised to be good girls if only God would heal Karly, right now, right this very minute.

  Shelley knew when she saw the doctor’s fretted brow that all their ardent prayers and silver-tongued promises could cease.

  Sarah turned toward the door. A familiar blankness shrouding her face.

  “Dr. Hochfeld,” the man in the white coat said, introducing himself. He did not offer a handshake. Neither woman rose. They continued to grasp each other.

  “Karla is dead,” he said. His tone was terse—an even-tempered man standing two steps beyond agitated.

  The wailing resumed.

  “But they told me they got a pulse!” Sarah screamed through tears. Fists balled up, she beat the couch. “They told me they got a pulse!”

  Shelley lacked Sarah’s fury, but her tears fell, too, hard and steady.

  The doctor and detective stood by, silently, waiting for a break in the squall. One minute, then two, passed before Dr. Hochfeld spoke sternly, eyes blurred by despair.

  “Karla had numerous bruises to her face. Do you have any idea where those came from?” he asked.

  Sarah looked up. Dr. Hochfeld turned toward the officer at his side. As a warning to her, he said, “This is Detective Wells with the Corvallis Police Department.”

  There was another pause as choking sobs subsided. Sarah was struggling to find her breath to speak.

  “She jumped off the bed last night,” Sarah offered. “Those bruises, they came yesterday, to her eye and her arm.”

  When a child lies beaten to death, a reckoning is called for. Dr. Hochfeld’s next question let Sarah know he didn’t believe her.

  “Karla’s eye was very swollen.”

  “She has very bad allergies,” Sarah said. “She’d been rubbing her eye.”

  Unconvinced, Hochfeld left the room without another word. Never in his twenty-seven years of medical practice had he ever seen a child so severely beaten. The little girl’s head injuries alone couldn’t have been worse if she’d fallen from a two-story window.

  Shortly before Karly was declared dead, Lieutenant Tim Brewer notified Benton County District Attorney Scott Heiser. Brewer told him a three-year-old child had been transported to Good Samaritan Hospital and that investigators on the scene were saying she had been badly beaten.

  Heiser was serving his second term as DA, a job he’d held since 1999. Heiser has a sharp chin, disarming smile, and clipped hair. He was a local boy who obtained his undergraduate in Economics from OSU and his law degree from Northwestern School of Law at Lewis and Clark, a private college in Portland.

  Heiser prosecuted a number of child abusers,
though most were sex offenders, but among his cases he couldn’t recall any abused child who had died. As he headed across the street to the Corvallis Police Department, he hoped Brewer was wrong, and that the EMTs had been able to revive the little girl.

  •

  In a private room at the hospital, a police investigator pulled up a chair in front of Sarah and Shelley.

  “I’m Detective Wells with the Corvallis Police Department,” he said.

  Both women nodded, still crying.

  Wells placed a tape recorder between them.

  “I’m not really good at writing things down so I’m going to go ahead and just record this so I can make sure I get everything when we talk, okay?”

  The women bobbed their heads, unable to say anything coherent.

  “What’s your name again?”

  “Sarah.”

  “And what’s your relationship?” Wells asked, looking at Shelley.

  “Um, she’s my best friend and my roommate,” Sarah replied.

  “Okay, and your roommate?”

  “But we’re not lesbians,” Sarah said.

  The detective thought that was an unusual clarification to make at such a time. He asked Shelley to spell her name. Both women were crying so hard that even with the recorder it was difficult to decipher their answers.

  “I’m Karly’s godmother,” Shelley Freeland said. She added that Karly and Sarah lived with her. They covered all the basics, including that Shawn Field lived at the duplex on Aspen Street, where Karly was last seen alive. But Sarah clarified that relationship, too.

  “He’s not actually my boyfriend anymore. We just broke up.”

  “When did you guys break up?”

  “Um, two weeks ago, two or three weeks ago today.”