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I thought this was a good illustration of how well the police will protect you when you call them. this was in todays Inquirer. Interesting hoew the cas ewas under a gag order for the last year. And they still have not caught the center city rapist, despite his established pattern of victims (all Penn students), and the excellent description they have of him.
By Craig R. McCoy and Mark Fazlollah
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS
Two anguished calls to 911 define the strangulation of Shannon Schieber.
"My next-door neighbor, I just heard her yelling for help," a fellow tenant in her Center City apartment building told a police dispatcher the night she was killed. "I just heard her yell help. I knocked on the door and I just heard like a . . . choking-type sound."
Twelve hours later, the same neighbor dialed 911 again, after he and Schieber's brother broke down her door - an action that police chose not to take when they responded to the first 911 call.
"There's a dead person in the apartment next door. . . . I called last night. I heard what I thought was yelling," Parm Greeley said.
His words were captured forever on police 911 tapes and released yesterday as a federal judge made public hundreds of pages of information about Schieber's murder 21/2 years ago.
What Greeley said to police when they responded to his first 911 call - and what police said to him - now stands out as the key issue of a lawsuit filed against the city and the Philadelphia Police Department by Schieber's parents.
The parents contend that the killer was inside, strangling their 23-year-old daughter, when police knocked on her door. They say the police decision against knocking down the door sealed their daughter's fate and left her to die at the hands of the so-called Rittenhouse rapist.
Sylvester and Vicki Schieber, of Chevy Chase, Md., say the police force was poorly trained and often looked for reasons to ignore sex crimes.
The city denies all that. Its lawyers say the two officers who responded that night faced a difficult decision and made the right call based on the facts known to them. The law bars police from knocking down doors without sufficient reason.
As for Greeley, one of the responding officers says he was "wishy-washy." Police say he was equivocal about what he had heard and worried about being embarrassed if police "took the door" and found nothing amiss.
The parents and lawyers for the city have been fiercely litigating the lawsuit for months now, fighting over which witnesses may testify and how much they may say.
Until yesterday, much of the debate was in secret. City lawyers, who were upset after The Inquirer in late 1999 published an article on the case based on a deposition by Police Commissioner John F. Timoney, won a confidentiality pact that sealed virtually every filing in the case. The city contended that letting the case proceed in public might compromise the investigation.
But yesterday, the federal judge in the lawsuit, Norma L. Shapiro, made public a year's worth of legal documents in the case. She did so at the urging of a lawyer for The Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News.
In all, Shapiro, with one simple order, made public 20 separate legal pleadings, transcripts of 911 tapes, and other evidence - and interviews by homicide detectives and lawsuit lawyers with virtually every key actor in in the drama, including the responding officers, as well as Greeley and other neighbors who gathered in a knot with the police outside Shannon's locked door.
In sum, the documents provide an in-depth look at how police responded to Schieber's killing. DNA evidence later showed that she was among six young women living near Rittenhouse Square who were attacked by the same man. He is still at large.
Of his six victims, Schieber was the only one to fight back.
After midnight on May 7, 1998, Greeley, then 28, was watching television with his girlfriend inside their second-floor apartment on 23d Street, just north of Spruce.
Across the hall lived Schieber, an academic super-achiever who was enrolled at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Greeley, who held a chemistry degree from Columbia University and had just been accepted to medical school, was checking out The Learning Channel, watching specials on Egypt and dinosaurs.
Then, there was a noise.
"We heard a scuffle, and what sounded like a scuffle from Shannon's apartment," Greeley said in a deposition. "I thought it was in Shannon's apartment.
"I heard what sounded like footsteps-type sound, and it sounded like things falling over, maybe."
He though he heard Schieber telling someone to "get away from me."
"I thought it was a domestic dispute of some sort," he said. "She was telling someone to leave her alone basically. . . . It sounded like it could have been physical."
His girlfriend, Leah Basickes, then 25 and also a Penn graduate student, said in a separate deposition that she had thought the sound drifted in from outside.
The couple didn't know Schieber well. Neither intervened.
Basickes went to bed. Greeley continued watching television.
About a half hour later, he heard something anew. This time, it was more unnerving.
" 'Help me,' " Greeley said he heard Schieber scream. Then, he said, her cries ended as if "the air was being choked off."
Greeley, a bear-sized six-footer, immediately left his apartment and stepped across the eight-foot hall separating his apartment from Schieber's.
"Shannon, are you OK?" Greeley asked, knocking on the door, barefoot, in shorts and a pink T-shirt. No answer. He tried the door handle, but it was locked.
Greeley woke up his girlfriend and told her to call police.
Then he stepped back across the hall and again banged on Schieber's door.
"Shannon, Shannon. Are you all right?" he shouted.
He added later: "I was worried. I thought, I got to get this door down or something."
At the same time, he was afraid: "I thought if there's someone in there with a knife or something, what am I going to do."
Then he went back and asked Basickes if she'd called the police. She hadn't.
At 2:04 a.m, Greeley dialed 911.
Within seconds of getting the call, police-radio dispatchers alerted all patrol cars in Center City's Ninth Police District: "It's a report of a female screaming, 251 South 23d. It's coming from the second-floor apartment, front."
In separate cars, Police Officers Raymond Scherff and Steven Woods, who both joined the force in late 1995, began heading toward 23d Street. Both were some distance away, on the edge of the big district.
While awaiting police, Greeley raced downstairs, in hopes of getting help from a man who lived in the first-floor apartment.
The man wasn't in, but his roommate, Amy Reed, then 25 and a Penn doctoral candidate in immunology, joined Greeley in the hallway.
In her deposition, Reed said she, too, had heard "some commotion" some time earlier, evidently at the same time Greeley and his girlfriend first heard the noises.
Reed said the noise "sounded as if something had toppled over, perhaps books or something relatively heavy." Not unduly disturbed by the sound, she had gone to sleep.
Greeley raced back upstairs, alone. He pounded the door a third time.
"Shannon, Shannon. Are you OK?" he again asked outside her door.
"I called the police," he added.
Seven minutes after Greeley's 911 call, Scherff pulled up outside Schieber's apartment, with Woods right behind.
Reed and Greeley were waiting outside. At the curb, Greeley said, he told the police that he had heard his neighbor cry for help, followed by a "choked-off sound."
All four headed upstairs and clustered outside Schieber's door.
The officers told the neighbors to step back from the door. Using their hands and nightsticks, the police pounded on the entrance.
"Police," they yelled. "Come out."
Again, silence.
Another neighbor, Christen Ritter, then a 25-year-old Penn graduate with degrees in chemistry and history, joined the crowd. Alerted by police banging on the door, he came down from his third-floor apartment.
At this point, a crucial discussion took place. Greeley equivocated. Police backed off.
In his deposition, Greeley acknowledged that he told the officers that he was uncertain about whether the cries had come from Schieber's apartment.
Moreover, he told police: "I'll be embarrassed if you break down the door and nothing has happened."
"It was my ego on the line," he explained later.
Reed, the downstairs neighbor woken up by Greeley, said in a separate deposition that it was the police who first raised the issue of Greeley's possible embarrassment.
"I believe they asked him how he would feel if they knocked down the door and nothing was happening," she testified.
Ritter, the upstairs neighbor, said the police decision not to break down Schieber's door appeared correct at the time.
"The police officers did what was reasonable, given the circumstances they encountered," he said. "There was nothing apparently wrong."
In their depositions, Officers Scherff and Woods pointed to Greeley's uncertainty in discussing why they did not break into the apartment.
Had Greeley been firm about the origin of the cry, Woods said, that would have enough for the two officers to call a police supervisor to the apartment for guidance.
"From what I can recall," Woods said, "he wasn't sure whether the scream had come from inside the apartment or not."
Scherff was even more emphatic.
"If he said for sure it was coming from the apartment, you know, I'll take the door," Scherff said. "I would have taken the door without hesitation."
Summing up, Scherff characterized Greeley as "a wishy-washy type of guy."
Before departing the scene, the police inspected the outside of the apartment and saw no evidence of a break-in.
As they left, Woods said, he told Greeley, "If he heard anything else, we would come back and investigate it."
Five minutes after their logged arrival time, the officers called dispatchers to report they were leaving the scene.
Scherff told a dispatcher that the original 911 complaint had not, in fact, turned up a crime.
"Yeah," he said, according to the transcript released yesterday, "that's gonna be unfounded."
Twelve hours later, that changed.
Schieber's brother, Sean, rang the bell on Greeley's door.
His sister had failed to show up for a lunch date they had set. Did Greeley know where she was?
In response, Greeley poured out his story from the previous night. "I was in shock at this point and just sort of started saying, come with me, and telling him what happened," Greeley recalled.
Without hesitation, the two broke open Schieber's door. As soon as they entered, they saw her naked body on the bed.
Sean Schieber managed perhaps two steps inside. He collapsed.
"I essentially put my head down," Sean Schieber said later. "I didn't want to see. You know, it's one of those moments where you think you are dreaming, and you think if you close your eyes, you can go back to your state of dreaming. And what you see is not happening."
Greeley crossed the hallway to his apartment. Once more, he called 911.
By Craig R. McCoy and Mark Fazlollah
INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS
Two anguished calls to 911 define the strangulation of Shannon Schieber.
"My next-door neighbor, I just heard her yelling for help," a fellow tenant in her Center City apartment building told a police dispatcher the night she was killed. "I just heard her yell help. I knocked on the door and I just heard like a . . . choking-type sound."
Twelve hours later, the same neighbor dialed 911 again, after he and Schieber's brother broke down her door - an action that police chose not to take when they responded to the first 911 call.
"There's a dead person in the apartment next door. . . . I called last night. I heard what I thought was yelling," Parm Greeley said.
His words were captured forever on police 911 tapes and released yesterday as a federal judge made public hundreds of pages of information about Schieber's murder 21/2 years ago.
What Greeley said to police when they responded to his first 911 call - and what police said to him - now stands out as the key issue of a lawsuit filed against the city and the Philadelphia Police Department by Schieber's parents.
The parents contend that the killer was inside, strangling their 23-year-old daughter, when police knocked on her door. They say the police decision against knocking down the door sealed their daughter's fate and left her to die at the hands of the so-called Rittenhouse rapist.
Sylvester and Vicki Schieber, of Chevy Chase, Md., say the police force was poorly trained and often looked for reasons to ignore sex crimes.
The city denies all that. Its lawyers say the two officers who responded that night faced a difficult decision and made the right call based on the facts known to them. The law bars police from knocking down doors without sufficient reason.
As for Greeley, one of the responding officers says he was "wishy-washy." Police say he was equivocal about what he had heard and worried about being embarrassed if police "took the door" and found nothing amiss.
The parents and lawyers for the city have been fiercely litigating the lawsuit for months now, fighting over which witnesses may testify and how much they may say.
Until yesterday, much of the debate was in secret. City lawyers, who were upset after The Inquirer in late 1999 published an article on the case based on a deposition by Police Commissioner John F. Timoney, won a confidentiality pact that sealed virtually every filing in the case. The city contended that letting the case proceed in public might compromise the investigation.
But yesterday, the federal judge in the lawsuit, Norma L. Shapiro, made public a year's worth of legal documents in the case. She did so at the urging of a lawyer for The Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News.
In all, Shapiro, with one simple order, made public 20 separate legal pleadings, transcripts of 911 tapes, and other evidence - and interviews by homicide detectives and lawsuit lawyers with virtually every key actor in in the drama, including the responding officers, as well as Greeley and other neighbors who gathered in a knot with the police outside Shannon's locked door.
In sum, the documents provide an in-depth look at how police responded to Schieber's killing. DNA evidence later showed that she was among six young women living near Rittenhouse Square who were attacked by the same man. He is still at large.
Of his six victims, Schieber was the only one to fight back.
After midnight on May 7, 1998, Greeley, then 28, was watching television with his girlfriend inside their second-floor apartment on 23d Street, just north of Spruce.
Across the hall lived Schieber, an academic super-achiever who was enrolled at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Greeley, who held a chemistry degree from Columbia University and had just been accepted to medical school, was checking out The Learning Channel, watching specials on Egypt and dinosaurs.
Then, there was a noise.
"We heard a scuffle, and what sounded like a scuffle from Shannon's apartment," Greeley said in a deposition. "I thought it was in Shannon's apartment.
"I heard what sounded like footsteps-type sound, and it sounded like things falling over, maybe."
He though he heard Schieber telling someone to "get away from me."
"I thought it was a domestic dispute of some sort," he said. "She was telling someone to leave her alone basically. . . . It sounded like it could have been physical."
His girlfriend, Leah Basickes, then 25 and also a Penn graduate student, said in a separate deposition that she had thought the sound drifted in from outside.
The couple didn't know Schieber well. Neither intervened.
Basickes went to bed. Greeley continued watching television.
About a half hour later, he heard something anew. This time, it was more unnerving.
" 'Help me,' " Greeley said he heard Schieber scream. Then, he said, her cries ended as if "the air was being choked off."
Greeley, a bear-sized six-footer, immediately left his apartment and stepped across the eight-foot hall separating his apartment from Schieber's.
"Shannon, are you OK?" Greeley asked, knocking on the door, barefoot, in shorts and a pink T-shirt. No answer. He tried the door handle, but it was locked.
Greeley woke up his girlfriend and told her to call police.
Then he stepped back across the hall and again banged on Schieber's door.
"Shannon, Shannon. Are you all right?" he shouted.
He added later: "I was worried. I thought, I got to get this door down or something."
At the same time, he was afraid: "I thought if there's someone in there with a knife or something, what am I going to do."
Then he went back and asked Basickes if she'd called the police. She hadn't.
At 2:04 a.m, Greeley dialed 911.
Within seconds of getting the call, police-radio dispatchers alerted all patrol cars in Center City's Ninth Police District: "It's a report of a female screaming, 251 South 23d. It's coming from the second-floor apartment, front."
In separate cars, Police Officers Raymond Scherff and Steven Woods, who both joined the force in late 1995, began heading toward 23d Street. Both were some distance away, on the edge of the big district.
While awaiting police, Greeley raced downstairs, in hopes of getting help from a man who lived in the first-floor apartment.
The man wasn't in, but his roommate, Amy Reed, then 25 and a Penn doctoral candidate in immunology, joined Greeley in the hallway.
In her deposition, Reed said she, too, had heard "some commotion" some time earlier, evidently at the same time Greeley and his girlfriend first heard the noises.
Reed said the noise "sounded as if something had toppled over, perhaps books or something relatively heavy." Not unduly disturbed by the sound, she had gone to sleep.
Greeley raced back upstairs, alone. He pounded the door a third time.
"Shannon, Shannon. Are you OK?" he again asked outside her door.
"I called the police," he added.
Seven minutes after Greeley's 911 call, Scherff pulled up outside Schieber's apartment, with Woods right behind.
Reed and Greeley were waiting outside. At the curb, Greeley said, he told the police that he had heard his neighbor cry for help, followed by a "choked-off sound."
All four headed upstairs and clustered outside Schieber's door.
The officers told the neighbors to step back from the door. Using their hands and nightsticks, the police pounded on the entrance.
"Police," they yelled. "Come out."
Again, silence.
Another neighbor, Christen Ritter, then a 25-year-old Penn graduate with degrees in chemistry and history, joined the crowd. Alerted by police banging on the door, he came down from his third-floor apartment.
At this point, a crucial discussion took place. Greeley equivocated. Police backed off.
In his deposition, Greeley acknowledged that he told the officers that he was uncertain about whether the cries had come from Schieber's apartment.
Moreover, he told police: "I'll be embarrassed if you break down the door and nothing has happened."
"It was my ego on the line," he explained later.
Reed, the downstairs neighbor woken up by Greeley, said in a separate deposition that it was the police who first raised the issue of Greeley's possible embarrassment.
"I believe they asked him how he would feel if they knocked down the door and nothing was happening," she testified.
Ritter, the upstairs neighbor, said the police decision not to break down Schieber's door appeared correct at the time.
"The police officers did what was reasonable, given the circumstances they encountered," he said. "There was nothing apparently wrong."
In their depositions, Officers Scherff and Woods pointed to Greeley's uncertainty in discussing why they did not break into the apartment.
Had Greeley been firm about the origin of the cry, Woods said, that would have enough for the two officers to call a police supervisor to the apartment for guidance.
"From what I can recall," Woods said, "he wasn't sure whether the scream had come from inside the apartment or not."
Scherff was even more emphatic.
"If he said for sure it was coming from the apartment, you know, I'll take the door," Scherff said. "I would have taken the door without hesitation."
Summing up, Scherff characterized Greeley as "a wishy-washy type of guy."
Before departing the scene, the police inspected the outside of the apartment and saw no evidence of a break-in.
As they left, Woods said, he told Greeley, "If he heard anything else, we would come back and investigate it."
Five minutes after their logged arrival time, the officers called dispatchers to report they were leaving the scene.
Scherff told a dispatcher that the original 911 complaint had not, in fact, turned up a crime.
"Yeah," he said, according to the transcript released yesterday, "that's gonna be unfounded."
Twelve hours later, that changed.
Schieber's brother, Sean, rang the bell on Greeley's door.
His sister had failed to show up for a lunch date they had set. Did Greeley know where she was?
In response, Greeley poured out his story from the previous night. "I was in shock at this point and just sort of started saying, come with me, and telling him what happened," Greeley recalled.
Without hesitation, the two broke open Schieber's door. As soon as they entered, they saw her naked body on the bed.
Sean Schieber managed perhaps two steps inside. He collapsed.
"I essentially put my head down," Sean Schieber said later. "I didn't want to see. You know, it's one of those moments where you think you are dreaming, and you think if you close your eyes, you can go back to your state of dreaming. And what you see is not happening."
Greeley crossed the hallway to his apartment. Once more, he called 911.