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.”
Chapter Forty
Over 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. Chervenak 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 rapidl
y 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.
KARLY SHEEHAN: True Crime behind Karly's Law Page 21
