KARLY SHEEHAN: True Crime behind Karly's Law by Karen Spears Zacharias

Author:Karen Spears Zacharias [Zacharias, Karen Spears]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Redbird Publishing
Published: 2014-06-03T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Six

Carol Brill’s mother died the first week in May. Sarah called her brother, Doug, and asked if she could hitch a ride down to Redding, California, for their grandmother’s funeral.

It was a grueling trip: eight people packed together in an SUV for the six-hour drive: Doug, his wife Gretchen, their four kids, plus Sarah and Karly. Sarah sat in the very back between Karly and her cousin Emily.

Somewhere north of Redding, Doug pulled the car into a rest area to give the kids a break. They ran. They hollered. They jumped in puddles. No one could remember what exactly set Sarah off, but something did. She grabbed Karly by the shoulders, shook her, and then threw her sobbing daughter into the car seat in the very back of the vehicle and began to scream at her.

“Be quiet!”

Karly continued to cry.

“Why don’t you just shut your mouth? I don’t want to hear any more of it!”

Doug and Gretchen were stunned.

“She’s just being a kid,” one of them muttered.

At the family dinner following the funeral, Sarah complained to those within earshot that David would hardly have anything to do with Karly, that she was a single mom having to manage all by her lonesome, putting herself through college. Sarah probably didn’t notice the family members who knew better rolling their eyes.

Gretchen walked away. “None of it was true,” she later told detectives. It was more fiction crafted to evoke sympathy for Sarah.

Meanwhile, as Sarah stood in the church fellowship hall, talking about herself, Karly was running around the church parking lot unsupervised.

“The thing that disturbed me the most was Sarah just seemed so disconnected from Karly,” Gretchen recalled. “Karly would run inside and see her mom and she didn’t get anything out of her mom, attention or anything.

“Sarah would keep talking to whoever she was talking to, and just totally ignore her, so Karly would run back to where the excitement was with the kids,” Gretchen said. “There was no emotional attachment that I could see at all. Karly was just a little prize, kind of: this is my daughter.”

The next day, Karly rode back with her aunt and uncle while Sarah rode in her parents’ car, sleeping mostly. Nearly every five minutes, Karly asked the same questions, over and over again.

“Uncle Doug, do you know how to get to my daddy’s house? Are you sure you know where my daddy lives?”

Karly’s anxiety made the trip seem twice as long. Finally, she went absolutely wild with joy when Doug pulled over at a gas station along Interstate 5 and David was there to get her.

That Sunday, Mother’s Day, Karly spent the day with her father. Sarah dropped by briefly. She spent less than an hour with her daughter.

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