A Silence of Mockingbirds (11 page)

U
nfounded for abuse!

On December 7, 2004, upon the recommendation of Detective
Karin Stauder and Matt Stark, the Oregon Department of
Human Services ruled the case for abuse of Karly Sheehan closed.

Detective Stauder’s report stated:

Case Unfounded. Based on the information I learned in my investigation,
I do not believe Sarah or David are physically abusing Karly; nor anyone else
I identified. I believe the cause and start of Karly’s hair pulling is the
result of her new living arrangement with her mother moving in with her boyfriend.
According to Sarah, Karly was fine when she visited her at her boyfriend’s
house, but when she actually moved in with her boyfriend it caused a great
deal of stress for Karly.

Stauder did not reach this ruling in isolation. She depended upon
the insights and input of Matt Stark. Tasked by the Oregon Department
of Human Services with providing for the protection of minor children,
it was Stark who decided “there was no reasonable cause to believe
Karly was the victim of physical abuse. She did not provide a statement
herself to indicate she had been.”

Ninety percent of the 1,500 children who die in this country every
year as a result of child abuse are age three and under. Experts believe
abusers choose their prey based upon a child’s very inability to tattle.

Experts in the field say fear is the most common reason children
don’t report their abusers. Many victims recount stories of telling their
mothers of abuse, only to be confronted with doubt and disbelief, or
worse yet, to be accused of lying outright. Karly may have tried to
tell her mother that Shawn was hurting her, only to be dismissed or
reprimanded for it.

It is oddly coincidental that I sit typing this six years to the day since
Detective Stauder and Matt Stark concluded three-year-old Karly was
not the victim of child abuse. It’s a cold, rainy, dark day in Oregon. Over
the random airwaves of Pandora, Celtic Woman, a female ensemble, is
singing “Away in the Manger”: “Be near me, Lord Jesus, I ask you to stay
close by me forever and love me I pray. Bless all the dear children in thy
tender care and take us to heaven to live with you there.”

I am overcome with a sorrow darker than a starless midnight. As
a woman of faith, I look for comfort in my beliefs, but if faith becomes
our balm for such heinously wrong acts, doesn’t that serve to make us
bystanders, if not participants, in such evils?

Up on the mountain where Karly’s maternal grandparents reside,
the driving conditions are often dangerous during the winter. Years ago, the
new head football coach from Pendleton, his wife and two daughters were killed
there. The family had gone in search of a Christmas tree. They were headed
back to town with it loaded onto their truck when angry winds bit off a chunk
of an evergreen near the road and spit it out. The tree struck the truck’s
windshield and killed them on impact.

Theirs was the only group funeral I’ve ever attended. I remember
the younger girl’s casket best. It was shiny pink, and oh, so tiny. A
bassinette crafted from cold metal, designed to deliver a child straight
to God’s front door. The Bentley of coffins. A coffin not unlike the one
that delivered Karly from evil. The “system” was supposed to do that,
and keep her alive, but we all failed her. We are all guilty.

 On what should have been Karly’s sixth birthday, I sent
David a note telling him I didn’t have any idea what it must be like to have
a daughter’s birthday without the daughter around. In postscript, I added
my wish that he didn’t know either.

David wrote back: “Thanks for acknowledging Karly’s birthday.
She was so big, bright, loving, and such good company at three that
I wonder what she would have been like now. I imagine I will wonder
that for the rest of my life, with every passing age.”

Everything outside on this cold day is as still as a child
in death. Silent tears will fall into soft pillows this Christmas season and
seasons to come as those who loved Karly best, and even those who only know
her from the stories retold, continue to remember the cries of a child distressed.

Others have spoken to me about the tears that Detective Stauder has shed.
It’s difficult to read the words of her report, knowing what we all know now,
and not see the warning “Danger Ahead” embedded in Stauder’s own words:
“I
believe the cause and start of Karly’s hair-pulling is the result of her new
living arrangement with her mother moving in with her boyfriend.”

A
s David drove by a gleaming glass office building shortly
before their last Christmas together, Karly pointed at the
mirrored building and said, “When I’m big and I’m a dada,
I’m going to work there.”

David corrected her and said, “But Karly, when you’re big you won’t
be a dada. You’ll be a mommy.”

“I don’t want to be a mommy!” Karly cried. “I want to be a dada! I
want to be a dada!”

David would recall that incident later in court as the moment when
he knew something was terribly amiss between daughter and mother. “I
told Sarah, ‘Your relationship with Karly is beginning to crumble here
and you’d better take some steps to address it.’”

Delynn was expecting Karly at daycare on Tuesday, December
7, 2004, the same day the state ruled the abuse case unfounded, but Sarah
called and said she wouldn’t be bringing Karly that day because she was taking
her Christmas shopping instead. Delynn was flustered by the call. By this
time neither David nor Delynn trusted Sarah, yet Delynn felt she didn’t have
the authority to intervene. “I was in a weird position between David and Sarah.
I didn’t trust Sarah, but I thought, what could I do? The state’s been notified
and nobody’s done anything.”

There were times when Delynn considered she could be wrong. “I
was hoping things would get better,” Delynn said. But Sarah called on
Wednesday, too, and said Karly was sick and she wouldn’t be bringing
her that day either. And then, on Thursday and Friday, Sarah didn’t call
or bring Karly to daycare.

Delynn was worried. “She was gone for the whole week she was
with her mom,” Delynn said. With David in Portland for work that
week, Delynn didn’t know what to do about Karly’s absence, if anything.
If she called David and complained, Sarah would get angry with her.
It was clear David and Sarah weren’t on good terms with one another.
Delynn didn’t want to contribute to the aggravation between the two
of them. Besides, really, what business of it was hers if Sarah wanted to
keep her daughter during the week her daddy was out of town?

On the weekends, David and Sarah had a routine for swapping
Karly. They would meet at the Starbucks at Timberhill Mall on Saturday mornings.
But on that Saturday, December 11, 2004, Sarah called David to make different
arrangements for the swap. Sarah wanted to know if it would be okay if they
could meet at his place instead of at Starbucks. Sure, he agreed, suspecting
nothing out of the ordinary.

“She said Karly didn’t look all that good,” David recalled. “I thought
she meant Karly had the flu or something like that.”

Sarah showed up with Karly in tow at about ten o’clock that
morning. David was completely unprepared for what he saw: Karly was
completely bald, save only for a few wisps of flyaway hair. Her face was
bruised. There was some yellowing—evidence the bruising was a day
or two old. One eye was slightly swollen. There was a teardrop-shaped
scratch under her left eye. Her lips were badly chapped, like those of a
person severely dehydrated. A silent, shell-shocked Karly reached for
her daddy. David wrapped his frail daughter in a protective embrace
and stared, open-mouthed, at Sarah, waiting for her to say something,
anything, to explain what had happened to their daughter.

“I was in shock,” David recalled. He questioned Sarah, demanded
to know what had happened to Karly. What had she done to their
daughter now? The only thing Sarah said as she handed Karly over to
David was, “This happened on my watch.”

David didn’t know what the hell Sarah meant. Was that some sort of
admission of abuse on her behalf? Sarah turned to leave before he could
spit out another word but not before David realized making the switch
at his house had been a very bad idea. Nobody had seen Sarah with the
battered Karly.

Bloody hell.

It was a trap designed to fix suspicion on David. Under any other
circumstances David would have done what any reasonable person
would do, the thing her mother should have done, and taken Karly
straight to the hospital. His mind was racing, his blood pumping as
David sought to soothe his distraught daughter.

“It was very out of the ordinary for Sarah to drop Karly at the house,
instead of at Starbucks,” David said. “I thought she was reckless and
irresponsible. She gave me no prior warning that anything was wrong
with Karly. She simply dropped her off and washed her hands of it.”

A trip to the hospital would ensure the abuse case would be
reopened, but it would be his word against Sarah’s, and the state agency
had already made it abundantly clear he was the primary suspect in
the investigation they’d just closed. Besides, David worried that if he
took Karly to the hospital the staff would insist on separating him from
Karly, and there was no way he was letting her out of his sight now.

Terror seized his stomach. Clenching his jaw, he carried Karly into
the house and sat on the couch. Karly clung to him like a baby chimp,
frightened. Nuzzled in her father’s neck, she didn’t cry, didn’t move,
and didn’t speak. She wanted nothing more from her father but that he
never let her go.

David was furious. He no longer questioned whether Shawn was
abusing Karly—he was sure of it. The problem was figuring out a way
to convince the investigators they had the wrong person. “I was very
concerned about getting blamed,” he said. “I was frustrated with their
decision-making process. I thought it was ridiculous they were accusing
me.”

David was convinced the state agency was looking for any excuse
to take Karly away from him. “They were so busy trying to compile a
case against me, they never bothered to find out what was happening
to Karly,” David said. “They continued to assume I was abusing Karly,
despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

David put balm on Karly’s lips. He tried to get her to drink as much
as possible. He knew he had to document the condition she was in, so he
held out a digital camera and snapped pictures of an emaciated-looking
Karly, battered and bruised, clinging to her daddy. Then, around two
o’clock that afternoon, he took Karly next door to the home of his good
friends, Dave and Jennifer Woolley.

Jennifer and Sarah had been friends since 1994, but their friendship
had worn thin in 2000. Jennifer told police investigators Sarah often
failed to pay her share of the rent when they were roommates, and
Sarah still owed her quite a bit of money. Moreover, Jennifer said she
wanted to distance herself from Sarah’s irresponsible reputation. Sarah
simply could not be trusted. Despite the breakdown in the relationship
between Jennifer and Sarah, David had continued his friendship with
the Woolleys after the divorce.

David knocked on their front door.

“David was holding Karly,” Jennifer said, later recalling that disturbing day. “She was very pale. Her hair sparse. She looked like a
cancer patient. She was bruised and scratched from head to toe.”

David haltingly explained that Sarah had brought Karly to him in
that condition and he wanted Jennifer to be an eyewitness.

“He was very somber,” Jennifer said. “He seemed to be at a loss for
words.”

Jennifer Woolley was not alone. She had a friend visiting who did
not know David, who did not know what kind of father or man he was.
She only knew she saw a man holding a battered child.

Karly clung to her father so much that every time he’d attempted
to put her down, Karly woke up whimpering and terrified. His daughter refused
to be left alone. But finally, and probably out of sheer exhaustion, David
was able to get Karly to sleep.

As soon as he was sure she was asleep, David put her to bed and
attempted to file a report with DHS. He called Matt Stark at about 7:30
that evening but Stark’s phone went to voice mail. David left him a
message, asking him to return the call.

Exhausted emotionally and physically, David crawled into bed
around nine o’clock. Earlier that evening Corvallis Police Department
received a phone call from a woman who identified herself as a teacher,
and thus a mandatory reporter. She wanted to talk to a police officer
about a possible abuse case. The child, bruised and bald, was at her
father’s home on Walnut Street. Her name was Karly Sheehan.

Hours after David had fallen asleep in his own bed, someone
banged on his front door. Roused by the pounding and still a bit dazed, David
opened the door.

“Officer Cox with the Corvallis Police Department,” said the young
police officer.

Cox was a general patrol officer. He’d been with the department for
three years, but he’d already distinguished himself, earning an Officer
of the Year award for his extraordinarily high number of arrests for
DUIs, drivers impaired by drug or alcohol abuse. (Cox would later
resign from his post at Corvallis following an internal investigation
into the aggressive and questionable tactics he employed to earn that
award.)

Officer Cox told David he wanted to see his daughter. David told
the policeman Karly was sleeping but the officer insisted he needed to
see her. So David escorted Cox upstairs to Karly’s room. The officer
shined his bright flashlight on the sleeping toddler. Alarmed, Karly
bolted upright and commenced crying.

“I took a look at her body,” Officer Cox recalled later in court.
“Much of her hair was missing. It looked like her hair had been pulled
out of her head.”

Cox studied the bruises splotched across Karly’s face and head and
made note of the numerous scratches on her face and the side of her
head. He did not take any pictures of Karly, but he looked at the ones
David had captured earlier on his digital camera.

David explained how Sarah Sheehan had dropped the bald-headed
and badly bruised Karly off that morning. The lawman told David he
was headed over to visit Sarah, but before leaving he issued an ominous
warning: “If your story doesn’t check out, I will be back for you.”

After the officer left, David checked on Karly. She was in his bed,
snuggled under the covers and so physically exhausted she couldn’t
keep her sleepy eyes open. David knew his own fate and Karly’s would
be determined in part by Sarah. Would she lie and say Karly had been
perfectly fine when she’d dropped her off earlier? If she did, David
figured the policeman would be back to arrest him. Such an arrest
would undoubtedly mean he would lose his job, and it would likely
mean deportation. At the time, running seemed like the worst of his
options, but David didn’t yet know the full extent of the evil Karly
encountered, or he might have snatched up his daughter’s hand and
caught the next plane.

Every loving parent understands that while their best dreams
revolve around their children, so do their worst nightmares. David had
woken up in the middle of Karly’s nightmare and he was at a complete
loss as to how he should rescue them both.

Even though it was well past midnight when Officer Cox left
David Sheehan’s home, the policeman drove straight to Shawn Field’s duplex
at 2652 NW Aspen Street. He knocked on the door and both Sarah and Shawn answered.

It is standard procedure for a lawman to separate people he thinks
may have conflicting stories, such as suspects or victims, but Cox didn’t
separate Sarah and Shawn. Shawn made it clear he didn’t want Sarah
talking to the police alone. That should have set off all sorts of alarms
in Officer Cox’s head.

Shawn and Sarah could have easily have said that the last time they
saw Karly, she was perfectly okay, and no one would have been the
wiser. But instead of denying Karly’s condition, Shawn gave Officer Cox
a ready explanation for Karly’s injuries. He told Cox that earlier in the
week he’d seen Karly balling up her fist, rubbing her eyes, and pressing
her thumbs into her forehead. Those bruises on Karly’s forehead? Those
were the corresponding marks left by her thumbs.

And that hair loss?

Well, Sarah explained to a none-the-wiser officer that Karly had
recently been diagnosed with trichotillomania, a weird hair-pulling
disorder. It was a little psychotic, for sure, but they’d been getting
treatment for her. Kids. They do the craziest things.

Cox glanced around the tidy duplex. He noticed the Beaver blanket
thrown over the couch and the framed professional photographs of
Shawn’s daughter hanging in the hallway. He saw no sign of anything
to give him cause for concern. No half-spilled prescription bottles. No
worn roach clips. No empty Jack Daniel’s bottles. Cox concluded there
was no indication Sarah or Shawn were under the influence of drugs or
alcohol. He’d know that. He was, after all, the leading cop in the state
on such arrests.

Before leaving, Cox urged Sarah to get Karly to the doctor again,
pronto.

No problem, she assured him, they were taking her to a specialist
later that week. Then Sarah thanked the officer for his obvious concern.

Back at the police station, Officer Cox filed an incident report. It was
posted at 4:46 a.m. and marked
No Press
.

Welfare Check
:

On 12-11-04, I responded to 4111 N.W. Walnut Blvd. on a welfare
check. Karla Sheehan’s (age 2) parents (David and Sarah Sheehan) are divorced
and she rotates who she stays with. Karla has recently started pulling her
hair out and hitting herself in the face and scratching herself with her hands/fingernails
while staying with Sarah at 2652 NW Aspen. Karla’s hair was very thin and
much of it had been pulled out. Karla had several small scratches and bruises
on her face and head. David and Sarah believe that Karla may have psychological
and head. David and Sarah believe that Karla may have psychological
problems and are getting her an appointment with a specialist on
12-13-2004. The scratches, bruises and the missing hair that I observed on
Karla appeared consistent with self-inflicted injuries.

Cox sent his report to DHS, and to Detective Karin Stauder, as
required, standard operating procedure for any potential child abuse case.