ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, April 3, 1997 TAG: 9704030017
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DIANE STRUZZI THE ROANOKE TIMES
STAFF WRITER LAURENCE HAMMACK CONTRIBUTED TO THIS STORY.
Sharon Casey had taken out numerous warrants against her ex-boyfriend, Miguel Ortiz. But warrants alone weren't enough to keep him away.
Sharon Casey wanted a better life for herself and her two children. So the 23-year-old motel housekeeper tried to get rid of the things that were holding her back. One of them was her boyfriend.
Miguel "Mike" Ortiz was known to carry a gun. He liked rapping, joking around and talking about his girlfriend, Sharon.
But in the past year, the couple had been fighting. And in March, they broke up.
"He just wanted to do what he could to get back together with her," said Cornell Walker, Ortiz's boss at Clean Machine Car Wash on Melrose Avenue Northwest.
Tuesday night, after hearing that Casey had taken out two misdemeanor warrants against him, he walked to her apartment on Bennett Drive Northwest. Witnesses heard a scream, then two gunshots.
When police arrived, they found Sharon Casey and her 42-year-old mother, Deborah Casey, shot to death. Shortly afterward, they saw Ortiz outside the apartment building, gripping a silver handgun and begging officers to shoot him. During the 60-minute standoff, he told police he had killed his girlfriend.
"She was all about bettering herself," Sharon Casey's friend Joan Hall said. "He wasn't, and she wanted to get on with her life."
Friends and relatives now ask what more Sharon Casey could have done to prevent her death and that of her mother. They ask why the criminal justice system could not do more. But their conversations keep returning to Ortiz - a 23-year-old man obsessed with a woman who shunned him.
The story of the relationship between Sharon Casey and Miguel Ortiz emerges as many domestic-violence cases do - through a series of warrants filed in court.
It started in May 1996, when Sharon Casey accused Ortiz of hitting her during a lunch break at her job. The charge was dropped when she didn't show up for court.
The two apparently had broken up sometime in March, the same month she took out another assault warrant, calling Ortiz a "weed smoker and dope dealer" who carried a gun and stole her car keys. Ortiz responded with an assault warrant of his own.
Then on Tuesday morning, Sharon Casey awakened to find her car's tires slashed. Sugar had been poured into her gas tank. Immediately, she thought of Ortiz, friends and relatives say.
Casey told her mother, her friends and her cousin Towania Turner that she planned to go to the magistrate that night and file more charges against Ortiz. She took her 2-year-old daughter, Chante, and her 7-year-old son, Daquone, to Hall's for baby-sitting. Then she went to work at AmeriSuites on Peters Creek Road.
After she returned home, Turner asked her to spend the night at her neighboring apartment. Casey mulled it over. But she went home and waited for her mother to drive with her to the magistrate's office.
Shortly before 9 p.m., Deborah Casey walked across the parking lot to the apartment of Donna Lynn Francisco, a friend of Ortiz's. She asked Francisco not to let Ortiz - who often hung around Caru Apartments - stay at her residence, Francisco recalled. Francisco agreed.
At the magistrate's office, Sharon Casey took out two warrants against Ortiz: one for property damage and another for tampering with a vehicle. Then she returned home.
Twenty minutes later, Casey called for help. She told a police dispatcher that Ortiz had kicked in her door and hit her in the head with a knife.
Officers arrived at 9:41 p.m. They took her complaint, called the magistrate's office about the warrants and searched for Ortiz. They told other police units in the area to be on the lookout for him and completed the call about 10:10 p.m., said Lt. William Beason of the criminal investigations division.
Turner saw the officers get back in their cars and urged Sharon Casey to come to her apartment. Then she embraced Deborah Casey for the last time.
Ortiz had been hanging out at the apartment of Missy McDermitt, who said he arrived around 9 p.m. and stayed 45 minutes.
He shared a bottle of vodka with a friend and was feeling buzzed, she said. McDermitt never saw a weapon.
"Somebody told him, 'I heard there was another charge out on you and that police are looking for you.''' McDermitt recalled. "[Ortiz] said, 'You're April Foolin' me. Well, let me go check this out.'''
What happened after the first confrontation between Ortiz and Sharon Casey is unclear. But about 10:20 p.m., Casey's neighbors heard a scream and a gunshot. A 12-year-old boy ran down the breezeway and saw Deborah Casey get shot.
"He told her to come here, and then he grabbed her by the side of the shirt and pulled her over and shot her," the youngster said.
Sharon Casey's two children remained inside the apartment, unharmed.
Police found Deborah Casey at the door of her daughter's apartment. Sharon Casey lay in the hallway by her bedroom.
McDermitt said she saw Ortiz as she walked outside her apartment building.
"He was was coming right towards me," she said. "He told me, "It's my time to die.'''
At 10:55 p.m., Ortiz was holding 20 officers at bay, pointing a handgun at himself and shouting that he had killed Sharon Casey. The growing crowd urged officers to shoot him.
"We had to make a decision at what point to use deadly force," Beason said. "That's a judgment call. You do it when he's pointing a gun at the officers or at citizens. We could have done it before, certainly. But we didn't want to.''
Officer M.W. Chandler struggled with Ortiz. But Ortiz escaped to a wooded area with other officers in pursuit. He stopped, turned toward them and raised his handgun waist high. Lt. J.E. Lahar fired one shot, hitting Ortiz in the stomach, according to a police news release.
Ortiz was taken to Carilion Roanoke Memorial Hospital, where he was recovering Wednesday. Police have posted a guard at his room and have charged him with capital and first-degree murder.
Autopsies found that Sharon Casey died of a gunshot wound to her chest and Deborah Casey died of a gunshot wound to her head. Their killings are Roanoke's first homicides of 1997.
Of 53 homicides in the city over the past five years, eight have involved women who were killed by their former husbands or boyfriends.
Most domestic killings fit a similar pattern: After the relationship failed, the women went to court to file charges or seek protection from their abusive partners before the violence turned deadly.
"In the majority of the cases, there was some sort of court action in the background and then for whatever reason, things just blew up on one particular day," Roanoke Commonwealth's Attorney Donald Caldwell said.
But there was no clear warning that Ortiz was a risk, he said. Ortiz's only conviction in Roanoke was a misdemeanor - carrying a concealed weapon.
"Certainly we've had many, many couples who were in court much more often than these people were, and in those cases there was never anything that even approached this kind of violence."
Caldwell said the best advice he has for women who believe they are in danger from an abusive spouse is to go into hiding until the court system has time to respond.
If a man is determined to kill a woman, "there's no way that the police or the state can guarantee protection," he said.
"So as harsh as it may sound, if a person truly believes their life is in danger, their first step should be to get out of town and not be found until efforts can be made to solve the problem."
LENGTH: Long : 149 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: DON PETERSEN THE ROANOKE TIMES. 1. Joan Hall, babyby CNBsitter to Sharon Casey's children, 2-year-old Chante and 7-year-old
Daquone, says the whole Caru Apartment community "is like a family,
and everyone is in shock" after the shooting deaths of Casey and her
mother, Deborah Casey. Hall's daughter Jasmine, 10 (left), is a
classmate of Daquone's and also was close to Sharon Casey. 2. Sharon
Casey (left) was just trying to make a better life for herself and
her children when she and her mother, Deborah Casey, were gunned
down Tuesday night at Caru Apartments in Northwest Roanoke. color. KEYWORDS: ROMUR