Strohmeyer Partly Blames Others

LAS VEGAS —  In a lengthy, rambling appeal before a packed courtroom Wednesday, Jeremy Strohmeyer, the Long Beach man who murdered a 7-year-old girl last year in the bathroom of a Nevada casino, asked her family for forgiveness but said he was not the only one to blame for her death.

As he was formally sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole, Strohmeyer, 20, made his first public comments about the May 25, 1997, molestation and slaying of Sherrice Iverson, saying he had “only an obscure, partial recollection” of the murder.

He then cited a list of people and agencies--including his former best friend, David Cash, who witnessed the prelude to the crime, the Nevada gaming commission and the America Online computer service--that he said bore some responsibility for the “violent explosion that I either can’t or won’t remember.”

“I have done a monstrous thing and am prepared, indeed willing, to be punished for it for the rest of my life,” said Strohmeyer, who was dressed in a blue jail jumpsuit, his hands manacled to his waist. “If I were given the opportunity to exchange my life for Sherrice’s and bring her back, I would not hesitate, not even for a second. . . . I am a condemned man--not only by the state but by my own conscience as well.”

In September, a last-minute plea bargain spared Strohmeyer from a trial that could have resulted in a death sentence. He pleaded guilty to four counts--including kidnapping, sexual assault and murder--in a crime that shocked the nation for its depravity and spurred debate about good Samaritan laws, tougher parental supervision and better security in casinos.

‘You Are a Demon. . . . I Can’t Forgive You’

As Strohmeyer’s father, mother and sister looked on Wednesday--the two women often sobbing uncontrollably--Sherrice’s mother, father and half brother addressed District Judge Myron E. Leavitt’s court, speaking tenderly about the little girl who dutifully followed her brother and who dreamed of becoming a police officer, nurse or dancer.

The courtroom grew tense as Sherrice’s mother, Yolanda Manuel, unleashed the first of two angry barrages at the young killer. Looking directly at Strohmeyer, the adopted child of well-to-do parents, she said she wanted him to stay in prison for the rest of his life so he wouldn’t have the opportunity to hurt another child. She wished, she said, that Strohmeyer could be blindfolded and have his feet cut, so he would die a slow and painful death, as, she said, Sherrice did.

“You killed an innocent child who wasn’t doing anything to you,” she said, her eyes filled with rage. “I don’t know what possessed you. You are a demon, a devil. I can’t forgive you. I want you to suffer.”

Unable to control her anger, Manuel broke off for a moment and then started in again on Strohmeyer, who sat 10 feet away, between defense attorneys Leslie Abramson and Richard Wright: “Look at you and your crazy, evil-looking face, like you didn’t do nothing to nobody. You have the nerve to sit there and look me in the eye.”

Moments later, Sherrice’s father, Leroy Iverson, appeared before the court in a wheelchair, describing his daughter’s love of the trips they took to Nevada casinos. He said he can still hear her voice when he gets home each night.

Then he turned toward Strohmeyer, his voice breaking, and asked him what he would feel like “if a black man killed your mother and your sister?”

“You need to be hogtied and dragged behind my car,” he said. “That was my daughter you killed, and she was all I had. And let me tell you something, you’re gonna get yours. And the same thing goes for your buddy David Cash.”

Strohmeyer and Cash were on a trip to Las Vegas with Cash’s father in May 1997 when they made a brief middle-of-the-night stop at the former Primadonna Resort & Casino near the California border.

Strohmeyer spotted Sherrice about 3:35 a.m. after she hit him with a wad of paper during a game she was playing with another child in the casino’s arcade. The girl was being watched by her older half brother as her father gambled at slot machines elsewhere in the casino.

For 10 minutes, Strohmeyer playfully chased the 46-pound girl, who was dressed in a blue sailor dress and black cowboy boots, following her into the women’s restroom. He became enraged when she hit him and he suddenly grabbed her, dragging her into a handicapped stall, he told the court Wednesday.

Cash has said that from the next stall he saw Sherrice struggling and tried to get his friend to leave, but then walked out of the restroom. Strohmeyer molested and strangled Sherrice, leaving her body draped over the toilet bowl, authorities say.

Strohmeyer told the court that he blanked out during the crime, suddenly waking to find Sherrice in his arms. “Can you imagine what it would be like to open your eyes, not knowing where you were or how you got there?” he asked. “To find yourself looking down on a half-naked, dying little girl?”

Strohmeyer said he lied to investigators to cover the involvement of Cash, who was not charged and now attends UC Berkeley, where he has been the subject of demonstrations by protesters who believe he should have intervened.

“I felt a misplaced loyalty toward David Cash and . . . I protected him by making sure that I took the blame for everything,” Strohmeyer said. “I did this because he was my best friend, and he had begged me to leave him out of it.”

Strohmeyer also blamed a “deceitful” former girlfriend and a Los Angeles adoption agency that he said concealed details of his birth family’s mental history. He accused casinos of carelessness in dealing with children and criticized two psychologists who he said misdiagnosed him.

David Cash Called an ‘Unfeeling Hater’

But he saved the most vitriol for Cash, whom he described as a morally corrupt “unfeeling hater . . . who would not lift a finger to save an innocent child from the drunken, drugged-out mess that I was.”

Mark Werksman, Cash’s attorney, said after Wednesday’s proceedings that Strohmeyer was “lashing out in desperation.”

“He and he alone pleaded guilty to killing Sherrice Iverson, and nothing he says now can change that,” Werksman said. “It may make him feel better to blame everybody but himself, but in the end he’s the one who has to live with the consequences of what he did.”

Strohmeyer called his crime a warning to teenagers about the corrupting influences he said contributed to his downfall--drugs, alcohol, Internet pornography and depression over adoption. He said the forces led a young man who once hoped to enlist in the Air Force to commit murder.

“I am not a monster, a pedophile, a delinquent, a sociopath,” he said. “I was not a predator waiting to snatch this child from her family. . . . I am not that different from other people’s sons or brothers or nephews or cousins.”

After the hearing, the victim’s family and their supporters criticized Strohmeyer’s comments as an insincere, self-serving attempt to gain sympathy.

“I think Leslie Abramson wrote the whole thing,” said Mollie Bell, a Compton community activist. “He blamed everybody and everything except himself. For that, he ‘blacked out.’ Yeah, right.”

Prosecutors agreed.

“It was a 30-page document of lies,” Clark County Deputy Dist. Atty. Bill Koot said of Strohmeyer’s statement, copies of which were distributed to the media by Abramson after the sentencing.

“He says he’s remorseful, yet two days after the murder he told two people he wanted to feel what it was like to kill somebody. . . . What kind of remorse is that?”

In the aftermath of Sherrice’s death, the Nevada Legislature is considering good Samaritan laws that would make it a crime not to report a witnessed assault, especially against a child.

On Wednesday, activists led by Najee Ali of Islamic Hope, a Los Angeles community group, presented Nevada prosecutors with 20,000 signatures from Californians in the hope they would reopen their investigation of Cash.

Koot said that nothing in Strohmeyer’s statement about Cash’s actions would lead his office to reopen its investigation, but added that the office was open to receiving any new evidence.

But Clark County Dist. Atty. Stewart Bell said Strohmeyer’s life sentence without parole meant closure in the case, more closure than even a death sentence could have brought.

“With the death penalty, you can expect the appeals to go on for years and years,” he said. “This way, we close our files and we don’t ever expect to hear about this case or this young man ever again.”

An in-depth story on Jeremy Strohmeyer and the murder of Sherrice Iverson is on The Times’ Web site: http://161.35.110.226/jeremy