Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 19, 1994 TAG: 9404190152
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By DAVID REED ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: HARRISONBURG LENGTH: Medium
When Camellia, an avid chess player, started to get into trouble at school and said she wanted to live with her father, family members said Fries took her to counselors and read self-help books.
So they were shocked and bewildered when Camellia, 14, and her sister, Stephanie, 12, were arrested and charged with stabbing the 35-year-old woman to death with an 8-inch kitchen knife.
"When you think about something like this, you always think there's a reason, like they were abused or something," Fries' niece, Angela Coffman, said. "But that's totally not it."
"She was dedicated to those children; nobody ever detected that anything like this would happen," Fries' brother, Galen Stearn, said.
But Deputy Commonwealth's Attorney Russell Stone said Camellia is a smart, calculating girl who saw several moves ahead: She likely will serve only two years for the crime and then move in with her father.
Camellia rolled her eyes and looked away Friday night when a jury foreman declared her and Stephanie's 15-year-old boyfriend guilty of first-degree murder. Stephanie goes on trial April25. The three were convicted by a juvenile court judge in December and appealed to circuit court.
"The juvenile justice system reflects a different time, when kids just got into mischief," Stearn said as he paced outside the Rockingham County Circuit Court, puffed an unlit cigar stub and awaited the jury's verdict.
Stone told jurors that Camellia and Shawn Roadcap killed Fries on Sept.4 because they didn't like her rules and her decision to send the girls to a military-style boarding school the following morning.
Stearn said the decision "was sort of a last step. She was at her wit's end."
Camellia's lawyer, Walter Green, asked the jury to believe her story that Roadcap alone killed her mother.
"I will never think a biological child, a 13-year-old girl, could take her mother out this way, the mother who raised her and fed her all those years," Green said.
But Stone told jurors to remember that Camellia wrote in her diary that she wanted to kill her mother and live with her father, who she said was more understanding when she got into trouble.
Camellia said while she did not get along with her mother, she was not serious about the threat. Many of her friends said the same thing at times, she testified.
Stone asked her if after "all this" she expected to live with her father, who also lives in Rockingham County. Camellia said she did.
Darryl Fries, her father, defended Camellia's emotionless testimony and behavior in court.
"Camellia has never showed much emotion in public. She's a strong girl, and when she cries, she cries to herself. It's not like she doesn't care.''," he said.
Stearn, who bears a strong resemblance to Camellia, said he felt like he was watching someone he didn't know when his niece was on the stand. "People that are capable of that kind of thing are like a stranger to me."
Social worker John Augsburger testified that he began seeing Fries and her daughters in December 1992 after a change in Camellia's behavior. Her grades dropped, she misbehaved at school, and "she made it very clear she hated her mother."
The daughters once ganged up on their mother, with one holding her down and the other hitting her, because they were upset about "normal parenting discipline," Augsburger said.
In testimony played on a tape recorder, Roadcap told investigators he helped hold Fries while Camellia and Stephanie repeatedly stabbed their mother.
Family members said in a statement that they want to remember the way Fries lived, not how she died.
"It is impossible to separate Marilyn's life from her children, because her children were her life," the statement said. "She always had time to sit and read to them, to help them with their homework or to have a slumber party ... they played, laughed and giggled together like three little girls on anybody's front porch."
by CNB