Although we didn’t plan it that way, it was fitting that Gazette-Times reporter Emily Gillespie’s story about the new book probing the heartbreaking Karly Sheehan case appeared on Sunday, the start of National Child Abuse Prevention Month.

It is true, of course, that the publication of the book, “A Silence of Mockingbirds,” by Karen Spears Zacharias, was timed to correspond with the national month. But regardless, the book and the news story provide a good opportunity to take stock of where we’ve made progress in battling child abuse, and where we need to keep pushing.

The good news is that we have made some progress since the horrifying 2005 case in which 3-year-old Karly died of injuries inflicted by Shawn Field, the boyfriend of the child’s mother – a case made all the more horrifying because of the missed opportunities to save the child’s life.

For starters, we have the law that bears Karly’s name that was pushed through the Legislature by state Rep. Sara Gelser. Karly’s Law requires that whenever child abuse is suspected, the vulnerable child is examined by a child-abuse expert within 48 hours – and mandates that photographs of suspicious injuries be taken. Either step might have triggered an intervention that could have saved Karly’s life.

Gelser reports that in the first year after the measure was signed into law, the number of abuse exams for children climbed 74 percent; over four years, she said, the number increased by some 180 percent.

That’s not necessarily because there’s more child abuse occurring, Gelser noted, but rather that we’re more attuned to noticing signs of abuse earlier.

That’s a good development. There is, of course, more that we can do – and nonprofit agencies and others are hard at work. At Monday’s City Council meeting, Maria Chavez-Haroldson, the executive director of Benton County CASA (Court Appointed Special Advocates), and Toni Ryan, the executive director of the Center Against Rape and Domestic Violence (CARDV), talked about their efforts.

The Benton County branch of CASA, of course, makes sure that someone – a court-appointed special advocate – represents the best interest of some 100 children each year as cases involving those children wind through the court system.

CARDV offers shelter for women fleeing domestic violence – and, Ryan said, there’s a strong link between domestic violence and child abuse. CARDV is about a month away from the grand opening of its Advocacy Center in Corvallis, a facility that will offer hope for victims of domestic violence and child abuse. That will be a huge step for CARDV – and for the rest of us as well.

On the six-year anniversary of Karly’s death, her father, David, visited the gravesite, sat down on the ground, and read her a book. Maybe it’s too much to hope that we can wipe out the need for other heartbreaking scenes like that one. But we certainly can work toward that day.

When Karen Spears Zacharias wrote the first draft of a book about the child abuse killing of a 3-year-old Corvallis girl in 2005, she did so as a journalist.

Great, her agent said. Now, rewrite it and include the other role you played in the book.

The result is the just-released “A Silence of Mockingbirds: The Memoir of a Murder” (MacAdam/Cage, hardback), which twines the former newspaper reporter’s dogged investigative reporting with the revelation that she had once been a close friend of the child’s mother, Sarah Sheehan, and is friends with the child’s father, David Sheehan. (The two divorced in 2003.)

If the Hermiston author blames the system for failing the little girl, she is unflinching in her belief that Sarah Sheehan’s neglect also allowed a boyfriend, Shawn Field, to murder Karly, one of 18 Oregon children who died of abuse in 2005.

Sarah Sheehan was not charged in connection with the death.

Revealing her connection to Sarah and David “was the only honest way I could tell the story,” says Zacharias, 55, who will be in Springfield Monday to discuss the book as part of an event sponsored by Jasper Mountain Center, a nonprofit agency that works with abused children.

In conjunction with National Child Abuse Prevention Month, Zacharias will join Jasper Executive Director Dave Ziegler and Greg Ahlijian — author of a children’s book, “The Large Rock and the Little Yew” — at 11 a.m. in the Council Chamber at Springfield City Hall, 225 Fifth St.

I wrote a column in 2005 about Zacharias’ first book, “After the Flag Has Been Folded” (Harper), about her father’s death in Vietnam. And, at her request, I read an early draft of her latest book.

Given the book’s subject, it’s necessarily a disturbing read at times. And, occasionally, Zacharias’ emotions intrude on the telling of the story. But, taken as a whole, it’s an important, meticulously documented book that required no small amount of courage on the author’s part. Unlike some others, Zacharias refused to “look the other way,” even if it meant losing friendships or ruffling feathers.

Sarah Sheehan lived with Zacharias’ family for a year in Pendleton during some troubled teenage times, then later left for Corvallis to attend Oregon State in 1995. There she met David, who had moved to Corvallis from Ireland to work for Hewlett-Packard.

They were married in 1998. Karly was born in 2002.

“I’m sure it looks like I’m betraying Sarah, and I’m not going to argue that,” Zacharias says. “But here’s what I’m left with: Do I tell the truth about this or do I not — out of loyalty to a long lost friendship? (The latter) is what happens in abuse cases. Hey, Sarah wasn’t a great mom. Everyone saw it. Nobody wanted to say it.”

Not that Sarah Sheehan was the ultimate “bad guy” in all this. In 2006, Field was found guilty by a Benton County jury on 17 charges, including felony murder and torture. He’s serving a 46-year sentence.

Zacharias believes that Sarah Sheehan knew of the abuse but ignored it, lied about it and, when trapped in questioning, deflected the allegations of it toward her ex-husband, David, by all accounts a committed father to Karly.

An autopsy showed Karly Sheehan, who died at Field’s duplex, had 60 separate injuries from head to toe. The coroner’s report said she had “substantial trauma to the head, physical symptoms consistent with asphyxiation by smothering.”

Zacharias said there were many who failed Karly. Among them: a Corvallis Police Department that didn’t do a thorough enough investigation after a child care facility owner reported possible abuse. And a state human services system that didn’t require Karly to be examined by a doctor well-versed in child care cases.

“We all failed her,” Zacharias wrote. “We are all guilty.”

Zacharias blames herself for breaking off communication with Sarah after learning she was leaving David; Karly had been dead for two years before Zacharias heard the news.

“But I did my work as a journalist,” she says. “I told a story that will educate and empower people to speak up against children being abused.”

If a silver lining exists in this dark-cloud story, it is “Karly’s Law,” a bill spearheaded by state Rep. Sara Gelser, D-Corvallis. It mandates that if a caseworker or law enforcement official interviews a child with suspicious injuries, they must take photos of those injuries and share the pictures with a county Child Abuse Response Team. What’s more, within 48 hours, the child must be seen by a previously designated medical professional specialized in child abuse.

It is, of course, not just Benton County’s problem.

“Lane County has the highest occurrence of child abuse in the state of Oregon,” says Linda Christensen, special projects coordinator for Jasper Mountain. “We have had too many children die as a result of it, too many children removed from their homes and placed in foster care, too many children in residential care, too many children damaged and without hope.

“That can change when we come together, do whatever we can to be of help and let children see, perhaps for the first time, they have value and someone cares.”

One Karly Sheehan is one too many.

Bob Welch is at             541-338-2354       or bob.welch@registerguard.com.

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Author publishes book on life, death of Corvallis child

Even though she had worked a number of years as a crime reporter, Karen Spears Zacharias says that nothing prepared her for the crime that affected her personally.

“I covered case after case of domestic violence and murder and sex abuse … and I understood that there were people behind every headline,” she said. “It sounds so trite but it is so true: You don’t think anyone you know is going to be in that headline.”

In her case, the heartache came after she learned that Karly Sheehan of Corvallis, the 3-year-old daughter of her close friend Sarah Sheehan, had been murdered.

And when Zacharias learned of the horrific details — that the blonde-haired, blue-eyed little girl had been beaten to death by her mother’s boyfriend, Shawn Field — she knew she was going to write Karly’s story.

Zacharias, a journalist who had written four books, originally set out to tell the story objectively.

“The initial completed manuscript was all true crime. My agent read it and said, ‘You did a great job, now you’ve got to go back and rewrite the whole thing.’” Zacharias said. “The minute she said it, I knew she was right. There was no way to be that journalist in the story given the relationship I had with Sarah and David (Sheehan, Karly’s father). … You have to be honest with the reader.”

So Zacharias took another year. The result is her just-published 322-page book, “A Silence of Mockingbirds: The Memoir of a Murder.”

In it, Zacharias chronicles the story of her friendship with Karly’s mother, Sarah Sheehan. She also writes about her research into the case, which included interviews with Karly’s father, David Sheehan; Joan Demerest, who prosecuted the case; Delynn Zoller, the child care provider who first noticed the abuse; and the jurors who convicted Field.

‘Like a daughter’

Zacharias initially became close to Sarah Sheehan when the two lived in Pendleton.

“Sarah was like a daughter to me,” Zacharias said. As a teenager, Sarah even lived with Zacharias for about a year in Pendleton.

But the two got into a fight in 2003 when Sarah told Zacharias that she was divorcing David, whom Zacharias thought was a good husband and good father to Karly. The next time they spoke, four years later, Karly was dead.

When Zacharias first learned that Karly was tortured and that her tiny body suffered more than 60 injuries before her death, she said she couldn’t move.

“I felt like my lungs collapsed, I could not breathe,” she said. “My mind just went wild. I thought, Oh my God, David never knew that Sarah and I had a falling-out. I’d never called. … I just was absent from all of that.”

Zacharias started her journey by making sure David Sheehan was OK with publishing his story. When Zacharias approached him, Sheehan was willing.

“I see the book as a responsibility to Karly’s legacy. It’s an important story to tell,” Sheehan said. “It’s a pretty accurate account of what happened … and Karen did a really good job of capturing Karly’s spirit.”

The murder of the young girl affected more than Karly’s family. It rattled all of Corvallis.

“I don’t know anyone who was not changed by this case,” Zacharias said.

And that includes the law enforcement and other officials who still wonder today if Karly could have been saved.

Her murderer is now serving sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole after 46 years at the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton.

‘A continuum of failure’

Throughout her book, Zacharias references a question posed by Judge Janet Holcomb during Field’s sentencing:  “Might there have been an intervention that could have saved this child’s life? I don’t know, but after hearing all the evidence it seems there was a continuum of failure after the first hint that there was something terribly, terribly wrong.”

Delynn Zoller, who owns Rugrats Traditional Home Child Care, was the first to spot trouble in the toddler, when in the fall of 2004 Karly showed up to daycare with thinning hair. When Karly uttered the words, “My daddy hits me,” Zoller called the state’s child abuse hotline. Despite the fact that the trouble started shortly after Sarah moved in with Fields and Karly was living part-time under their roof, the investigation was aimed at David Sheehan.

The next day, Sarah and David Sheehan took Karly to their primary care physician. At the same time, the Corvallis Police Department and the Department of Human Services investigated Karly’s injuries as possible child abuse.

Because the couple had an appointment with their doctor already scheduled, DHS worker Matt Stark allowed Karly to be reviewed by her doctor and did not refer her to ABC House, a child abuse assessment center that serves Linn and Benton counties.

The findings of the investigation were inconclusive, so the case was labeled unfounded for abuse.

Police investigated other suspicious injuries such as bruises and more hair loss, but when they interviewed Field and Sarah Sheehan, the two explained that Karly was causing the injuries to herself. Other injuries were attributed to trips and falls.

No one intervened, and Karly remained living partly with David and partly with Sarah and Shawn Field until she was pronounced dead at 2:40 p.m. on June 3, 2005.

“Karly’s death is not simply a tragedy — it’s an unforgivable shame,” Zacharias wrote.

Learning from mistakes

State Rep. Sara Gelser, who represents Corvallis and paid close attention to the case, pushed for legislation aimed at preventing the same errors from recurring.

Karly’s Law requires that whenever child abuse is suspected, the vulnerable child must be examined by a child abuse expert within 48 hours. Photographs are to be taken of suspicious injuries, acting as medical evidence if a crime is prosecuted. The law unanimously passed in both houses in 2007 with an emergency clause so that it could immediately go into effect.

Gelser thinks Karly would have been saved had she been seen by a child abuse expert early on.

Dr. Carol Chervenak, who at the time was the medical director for the ABC House, testified that she would have noticed the signs of abuse months before her death, Zacharias writes.

Since its passage, Gelser said, the law has worked.

In the first year after it was signed into legislation, the number of physical abuse exams for children increased by 74 percent and by 180 percent over four years.

“Before Karly’s Law, whether a child went to a medical professional was at the discretion of a DHS worker or police officer,” Gelser said. “Now we are getting them to the experts.”

The result of the law, she said, is that children who are being abused get fast action from those who can help them.

“We’re intervening more appropriately and more quickly,” Gelser said. “Abuse shapes not only the life of that child but the lives of their children and their children’s children … . We’re building safer families.”

The book’s April release was intended to coincide with National Child Abuse Prevention Month, Zacharias said.

“A Silence of Mockingbirds” is endorsed by the national advocacy group Childhelp, which focuses on the prevention and treatment of child abuse.

“What I hope this book does is urge every state to enact the same kind of law because it just makes sense,” Zacharias said. “If that law had existed in November of 2004, Karly would be alive today.”

In the book, Zacharias admits to at least one reservation about the project: The reaction the book will have on Sarah Sheehan, a woman from whom Zacharias once received Mother’s Day cards. (Sheehan declined to be interviewed for the book. Attempts by the Gazette-Times to reach Sarah Sheehan for comment were unsuccessful.)

“I worry about how betrayed Sarah is going to feel reading these words,” Zacharias writes.

But the idea of another child experiencing Karly’s nightmare pushed Zacharias past that hesitation.

“Each of us has to read Karly’s story and to learn those lessons and do better because we know better,” Zacharias said. Her hope for the book, she said, is “to have a different ending for another child.”

Emily Gillespie can be reached at 541-758-9548 or emily.gillespie@gazettetimes.com.

The minute I walked out the door of Benton-County Courthouse in Corvallis, Oregon in 2007, my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but it didn’t take me long to figure out who the angry woman yelling at me was. I knew Sarah Brill Sheehan like I know my own daughters. For a season in life, Sarah was like a daughter to me. She lived in my home, ate at my table, laughed with my children, and swapped stories with me.

But this Sarah, the one ranting at the other end of the phone, was a stranger to me in many ways. She was right when she declared “You don’t know me anymore.” I sometimes wonder now if I ever really did know Sarah. I wonder if anyone has ever really known her.

I’m not denying that Sarah had a right to be upset with me. I had debated numerous times about whether I should tell her that I was working on a book about the murder of her daughter, Karly Sheehan. I was torn over it.

“Don’t you think you owed me a phone call?” she implored.

It was the question I’d asked myself a gazillion times. I intended to tell Sarah at some point, but first I wanted time to sort through the court’s documentation and to get in as many preliminary interviews as I could. I was doing my best to approach the story as a journalist, gathering the facts the way I had done hundreds of other times during my tenure as a reporter.

Two years had passed since Sarah made that desperate 911 call on June 3, 2005.

“What’s your emergency?’ asked Dispatcher Andy Thompson. Sarah was so distraught it took nearly a minute before she was able to say, “My daughter is not breathing.”

I didn’t learn that by reading the newspapers. I obtained a copy of the 911 call and heard for myself the hysteria that detectives would later describe as just too intense. I don’t know how law enforcement makes such a determination, but there was something in Sarah’s demeanor that made them uncomfortable, made them wonder what role, if any, she played in her own daughter’s murder.

My husband was the first to tell me that Karly had been murdered. I knew in that very moment that I would write A Silence of Mockingbirds: The Memoir of a Murder (Macadam/Cage, $25, pub date April 1st), although I have always referred to it simply as Karly’s story. I also knew doing so would enrage Sarah, and maybe others, and that’s why I’d put off telling her. I’d been at work on the book for a couple of months when she got wind of it.

The reporter at the Corvallis Gazette-Times who had covered the trial called and told Sarah I was at the courthouse that day. The two had become friends during the course of the newspaper’s coverage. I don’t fault the reporter for that. It happens. Try as we might to remain objective, journalists are human. It would be unnatural for a reporter to not feel empathy for the mother of a murdered child.

But despite my history with Sarah, or perhaps because of it, my empathies weren’t with her. They were with David Sheehan, Karly’s father. I knew David adored Karly. It was the thing I had said to Sarah when she called me in 2003 to tell me she was leaving David.

Even then, I was panicked at the thought of what that would mean for Karly. I knew Sarah well enough to know that if she had custody of their daughter, Karly would be neglected. But I never in my most neurotic worrisome ways ever imagined that Karly would be tortured to death.

David was the first person I called after I learned of Karly’s death. He was the only person I asked permission from to write this story. I felt strongly then, and feel even more strongly now that David was the other victim. As an immigrant to this country from Kenmare, County Kerry, Ireland, David was an outsider. Due in part to Sarah’s carefully-constructed lies, David became the state’s primary suspect in the murder of the daughter he was trying so desperately to save.

It wasn’t the nightmare that Karly endured that propelled me to write this story. Nor did I write it because of any feelings of ill-will toward Sarah. Most often when I think of Sarah, I feel nothing but an overwhelming emptiness. Sarah’s pursuit of a life of reckless abandon cost Karly her life. In Karly the world lost a precious person who was all things bright and beautiful, and Sarah lost herself.

It was David’s love for Karly that compelled me to continue writing A Silence of Mockingbirds. I had witnessed the depths of David Sheehan’s love for his daughter. I knew him to be the better parent. But during my tenure as a court reporter, I’d also witnessed the biases our courts have towards women. I’d seen time again children placed in the hands of a reckless mother over a responsible father. I knew how reticent many district attorneys are to charge mothers with crimes, and when they do, how reluctant juries and judges are to hold mothers accountable.

Too often divorced fathers are portrayed in court and in media as deadbeats or parents-in-absentee. David was neither. He was, in fact, the best of fathers, which makes Karly’s death all that more inexplicable, troubling and tragic.

The United States has the highest rate of child abuse and neglect of any industrialized nation in the world. Over five children a day die in this country as a result of child abuse or neglect. Eighty percent of those children are, like Karly, ages four and under, too young and/or too frightened to cry for help. Child abuse fatalities nearly doubled in Oregon between 2009 and 2010, proving once more that no matter how many times the state’s Children Protective Services says it’s going to do better by its children, they don’t, and they never will until the public demands it of them.

There were times during the writing of A Silence of Mockingbirds that I questioned my abilities to tell this story, honestly, rightly. There was plenty to despair over, not only the cruelty of the man convicted of murdering Karly, but the broad-reaching incompetency of many that practically ensured Karly would not escape her killer’s hands.

Stuart Roberts, a police chief that I worked with during my reporting years, sent me the following message after reading the book:

I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been for you to tell Karly’s story given the relationship you shared with Sarah. It is my sincere hope that by living/telling Karly’s story, you are able to find peace. I have never been one to accept those things I cannot change. I am more of the mindset to change those things I cannot accept. I think we are a lot alike in that respect. I applaud your courage, perseverance and keen sense of right v. wrong.

Author Flannery O’Connor once said that “Truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”Indeed. The child abuse epidemic in this nation will continue unabated until we face the truth of it, and determine that we are going to change that which we cannot accept.

Photo courtesy of David SheehanKarly Sheehan snuggles with a favorite stuffed animal.

Karly’s Law

Karly’s Law mandates that children in Oregon who exhibit suspicious physical injuries in the course of a child abuse investigation must receive medical attention within 48 hours.Karly’s Law has specific requirements regarding the handling of cases involving suspicious physical injury that must be met by law enforcement, the Department of Human Services, and designated medical providers that have recieved specialized training to assess injuries that may have been caused by child physical abuse.— Oregon Department of Justice

Karly Sheehan had silky blonde hair, bright blue eyes and a life her father described as “a pursuit of joy.”

The 3-year old died in 2005 after her mother’s boyfriend beat the little girl to death in Corvallis. Her bruised body bore evidence of blunt trauma to the head. Many of her golden curls had been pulled out by the roots.