THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 17, 1996 TAG: 9603180185
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ELIZABETH SIMPSON, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Long : 302 lines
Natasha Chipp died at 2:45 p.m. on July 9, 1993.
It was only then that Treesia Chipp could hold the 4-year-old girl the way a mother ought to hold her child. Wrapped in her arms, up against her breast.
Nurses had pulled off the tangle of needles and tubes and splints that had gotten in the way of an embrace. They had combed the little girl's golden brown hair so it fanned across the bedsheet. They had wiped away the last trace of blood.
That's when Treesia walked back in the Kansas City hospital room to gather up the body of her daughter, sit with her in a chair and rock her for more than an hour.
She sang songs. Cried. Talked. And simply looked at the girl she had sent from her home in Virginia Beach to Stewartsville, Mo., only weeks before to stay with the girl's father.
``I remember telling her I was sorry. I was sorry I couldn't get her fast enough. I knew she wanted to come home.''
As she sat there, Treesia tried not to dwell on why Natasha lost consciousness two days earlier while the girl's stepmother was caring for her. Tried not to think about how the hospital social worker told her child abuse was suspected. Tried not to question the stepmother's explanation that the girl had fallen down in a hallway.
But when she handed Natasha's body back to doctors, she walked out of the hospital and made a vow that if anyone had caused her daughter to die, that person would be brought to justice.
It wasn't until four weeks ago - on Feb. 15 - that Treesia got a glimpse of the justice she sought for more than two years. That was the day when DeKalb County, Mo., sheriff deputies arrested her daughter's stepmother, Jessica Roxanne Bowman, on charges of second-degree murder in connection with Natasha's death.
``What I really truly want is for her to say what happened,'' Treesia said as she sat surrounded by mementos of her daughter. ``I want to make sure this doesn't happen to other children.''
In Treesia's small trailer park home in Virginia Beach is a collection of all things Natasha.
Sun dresses she used to wear. Her crayon-colored handprints. A lock of her hair in a plastic bag. The musical lamb Treesia bought for her in the hospital. The pink blanket she died on.
``A friend of mine washed this once and the blood stains came out,'' Treesia said, folding and refolding the blanket into a neat square. ``I really lost it when she did that.''
And then there is the thick binder of legal documents. The medical examiner's report that said the massive swelling and bleeding of Natasha's brain and the retinal hemorrhaging suggested that she died of ``blunt head trauma.'' The Social Services report that said the girl probably died from being shaken or hit. Letters Treesia wrote to the attorney general of Missouri, the Justice Department of Missouri, legislators and prosecuting attorneys, seeking an answer to her daughter's death.
Tucked in the back of the binder are articles about Shaken Baby Syndrome, a condition that results when a child is shaken so hard the brain is dislodged, a phenomenon Treesia believes caused her daughter's death. Jacy Showers, the director of a group called ``Don't Shake the Baby'' in Pueblo, Colo., said a survey that group did of 216 shaken baby cases showed that 75 percent of the cases involved children 1 year or younger, but that 4 percent were children 2 to 4.
``Most of the cases are children under a year,'' said Dr. Randell Alexander, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Iowa and nationally known expert on the syndrome. ``As children get older, shaking gets harder because they weigh more. But there have been cases involving children who were 4.''
Common symptoms of the syndrome, he said, are brain swelling and retinal bleeding.
The pile of papers on Treesia's kitchen table all lead back to the beginning of her story in the summer of 1993 when she lost her job at a produce stand.
Treesia needed some time to get back on her feet. So she sent her older daughter, Christina, to stay with her father in Minnesota, and called Natasha's father, Timothy Chipp, who was living in Stewartsville, to see if he could care for Natasha for a few weeks.
He agreed.
Timothy and his wife, Roxanne, came to Virginia Beach in mid-June to pick up Natasha and take her to Stewartsville, a small town of 700 in northwest Missouri.
Treesia went to North Carolina to look for work. She got a job at a Golden Corral and started saving money so she and her daughters could find a nice place to live.
In one phone conversation with her daughter, about three weeks after Natasha left home, the girl started crying. ``She said she wanted to come home and wanted to come home now,'' Treesia said.
When Treesia asked why, Natasha said her stepmother was making her take a bath. ``I said `Honey, everyone has to take a bath.' I just thought she was mad because someone was telling her what to do.''
Then Treesia's ex-husband got on the phone and said the girl had been whining and complaining ever since she had gotten there.
``I felt like she was sad and I needed to come get her,'' Treesia said. ``I felt torn. I knew she missed me, but I knew I needed to work and get the money saved up. Part of me wanted to get her, though, because she was sad.''
She called the next day, but Natasha was sleeping, and the next day she called again, but there was no answer. The following day, on July 7, Treesia got a call from a friend saying she needed to call her ex-husband. When she called, he said Natasha was in the hospital, unconscious. ``He said they didn't know what happened but that I needed to come right away,'' Treesia remembers.
Treesia took the money she had been saving and bought a plane ticket to Kansas City. ``All I remember is sitting on the airplane holding my stomach, rocking back and forth the whole way. My head felt like someone was crushing it. I kept praying everything would be OK.''
But when she arrived at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, everything was not OK.
When she first saw her daughter, she cried so hard she had to turn away. Part of the girl's head had been shaven and a shunt inserted into her skull. She had an IV in her arm. A tube in her nose. Blood encrusted her face.
She was wearing a diaper.
Treesia could find only one place on her daughter that was free of tubes and monitors - her right palm.
``I rubbed it and rubbed it and told her to wake up. Told her we'd get her some cookies.''
Treesia asked her ex-husband what had happened, and he said his wife told him that the girl had needed to go to the bathroom so Roxanne told her to run quickly, and the girl fell down in the hallway on the way to the bathroom. That's where Roxanne found her.
Treesia had noticed the girl had scratches on both sides of her chest. She talked with a friend who questioned whether the girl had been shaken. When she asked the doctor about the scratches the next day, he told her he thought the marks looked suspicious as well.
Later in the day a hospital social worker told her there was a possibility her daughter had been abused. ``I spent the rest of the night thinking `Oh my God, someone did something to my daughter,' '' Treesia said.
Doctors told Treesia and her ex-husband that the girl was brain dead and that they needed to make plans to cut off the life-support machines. The next day the doctor performed a brain scan on the girl while Treesia watched. ``They said if there was one little dot of brain activity, they would start over again. I prayed, I prayed, I prayed for that dot.''
But there was nothing.
Then they took her off the respirator for eight minutes to see whether she would make any attempt to breathe on her own. ``Tasha, breathe, dammit, breathe,'' Treesia told her daughter.
But Natasha would not breathe.
Natasha was put back on the respirator. Treesia signed papers to have her daughter's organs donated, told Natasha she loved her and walked out of the room while the machines that made Natasha breathe were turned off for the last time.
After she came back in and rocked her daughter for more than an hour, Treesia knew it was time to say goodbye: ``I realized she wasn't there any more.''
From Kansas City, Treesia went to Minnesota to pick up her other daughter, then went home to plan Natasha's funeral.
She picked out a grave. A small, white casket. ``The most expensive, prettiest dress ever.'' An undershirt. Stockings. A hairpin. A heart pendant.
At the funeral, Treesia sang ``Hush Little Baby, Don't Say a Word.''
``She always used to sing that song, and she was always telling me `Mama, you have to learn the words to that song.' ''
So she did.
Timothy and Roxanne traveled from Missouri to attend the funeral.
When Treesia got home from the funeral she got a phone call from the DeKalb Sheriff's Department. They told her autopsy reports indicated that Natasha probably died of abuse.
Treesia pulled out the funeral book that listed the address in Norfolk where her ex-husband and his wife were staying. She got in her car and went to find them, even though her friends said it was a bad idea.
When Roxanne and Timothy answered the door, Treesia said, ``My daughter died of abuse and I know who did it.''
Her ex-husband said Roxanne didn't hurt Natasha, to which Treesia screamed, ``You weren't there.''
He responded: ``You weren't there either.''
And that, in the end, is what is so frustrating to Timothy, Natasha's father. He will never really know what happened.
``I have been through medical books trying to figure out what happened,'' he said in a telephone interview from Stewartsville. ``No one can take a book and say, `This right here is what happened to your daughter.' ''
Timothy has been divorced from Roxanne for a year now. But his daughter's death had nothing to do with their parting, he said.
He believes Roxanne is innocent.
``My daughter was real tall and slender and there is no way she could have been shaken,'' Timothy said. ``She was too big to be shaken.''
Timothy said his daughter had had problems controlling her bladder, and he had asked Treesia about that. She told him she'd taken the girl to the doctor to check that out and been told she might have ``diabetes insipious,'' a disorder in which large amounts of urine are excreted. He faults Treesia for not being more aggressive in getting her treatment.
He also said that Natasha had run into a sliding glass door and hit her head before she had left with them for Missouri. He thinks that might have had something to do with his daughter's death. ``There's a kind of head injury where it can go two days or two years and then a slight bump will trigger it.''
Treesia, however, said Natasha bumped into the glass doors two weeks before she left for Missouri, and that it was a minor incident that didn't require any medical care.
When all is said and done, Timothy admits in a tired voice: ``I really don't know what happened.''
He said the case has never died in the small town of Stewartsville. He's lived in the shadow of the controversy for 2 1/2 years. ``Natasha's mother has pressed this from the beginning,'' he said. ``But this whole case is speculation. I think she's doing it for attention.''
Roxanne's attorney, John P. O'Connor, said two previous prosecuting attorneys have looked at the case and found nothing to go on.
``There's no new evidence, and the freshest report is three months after the event,'' O'Connor said. ``The burden of proof will be on them. For three years someone in the prosecuting attorney's office had doubts about this case, so you can assume a jury would have reasonable doubts too.''
A request to interview Roxanne over the telephone was denied by authorities at Harrison County jail where she was being held on bond.
The night of Natasha's funeral, Treesia and a friend went to Natasha's grave.
Sitting on the ground, Treesia recalled how she had sat in a playhouse outside the Ronald McDonald House in Kansas City the night after Natasha died and had seen a bright star in the sky. She had asked Natasha to give her some kind of sign, but nothing happened.
But now she noticed the same star in the sky, over her daughter's grave. She called it Natasha's star.
Treesia went home and in the weeks and months after the funeral, called the sheriff's department and the prosecuting attorney's office regularly, expecting charges to be filed.
But nothing happened.
``I kept calling and calling, and finally they said it was over,'' Treesia said. ``They said they thought it was an accident.''
She tried to hire an attorney but didn't have money for one. So she started writing legislators, the state attorney general, the Justice Department and experts on Shaken Baby Syndrome.
No one was able to help.
In August 1994, she got a letter from Bartley Spear Jr., a new prosecuting attorney of DeKalb County: ``Unfortunately there is insufficient evidence to support any criminal charge of wrongdoing. I sympathize with your plight, but there is nothing this office can do in your behalf.''
By this time, Treesia was losing hope her daughter's case would ever make it to court. But in the fall of 1994, Mark Goucher read about Natasha's case in the St. Joseph Press. He was running for the office of prosecuting attorney against Spear. He won the election and took over the office in December 1994. He decided to review Natasha's case, even though it was more than a year old by then.
``It took me a while to get familiar with the case, and then I just handled it like any other case,'' Goucher said in a telephone interview. ``If there's probable cause to believe a crime was committed, I have discretion to take it to court.''
Just having a new prosecutor in office had given Treesia renewed hope. Then, on Feb. 16, Treesia got a phone call from DeKalb County sheriff's deputies saying Roxanne had been arrested on charges of second-degree murder the previous day.
By this time Treesia was working as an Olive Garden waitress. She hung up the phone after hearing the news, then ran behind the restaurant and started crying.
Treesia returned to Missouri on March 7 to see Roxanne arraigned and a trial set for May. ``I felt like I was finally accomplishing something,'' Treesia said. ``It's not that I want to see this woman behind bars for the rest of her life or anything. I just want the person who killed my daughter to be responsible.''
When Treesia drove back home after the arraignment, she drove past the Kansas City hospital where Natasha died. ``I felt like I was leaving my daughter all over again.''
She felt a pressure as if she were going under water, then she wept. ``Goodbye Tasha,'' she said.
She looked in the sky and saw Natasha's star.
``All the way home in the dark, that bright star was there.''
Treesia hopes to go to Roxanne's trial in May, and has set up a fund at Central Fidelity Bank called the Friends of Natasha Fund, to help her travel to Missouri and to speak at associations regarding Shaken Baby Syndrome.
Sometimes she winds up a little musical lamb she bought her daughter in the hospital or pulls out a photo taken of her daughter after she died. In the photo, Natasha's lips are slightly parted, her eyes closed against tan skin, her hair combed out across the bed sheet.
``I can still hear her laugh. And I can remember little things she used to say,'' Treesia said. ``But it's hard for me to picture her.''
In a way, she agrees with her ex-husband that she wants Natasha's case to get some attention. But she says that's only because she wants others to know about the dangers of shaking a child.
``Maybe it will help some other child in the future,'' she said, stroking the toy lamb that once lay next to Natasha in the hospital. ``I want something good to come of my daughter's death.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
VICKI CRONIS/The Virginian-Pilot
Treesia Chipp treasures mementos of her daughter, such as the
photocopied handprints that Natasha once made in Sunday school.
Natasha Chipp, right, was 3 years old and her sister, Christina
Markey, 8, in this photo.
Photo
VICKI CRONIS/The Virginian-Pilot
Pictures of her daughters surround Treesia Chipp at her home in
Virginia Beach. Her younger daughter, 4-year-old Natasha, died in
1993 during a visit to her father and stepmother in Missouri.
Treesia's relentless inquiries to officials helped lead to the
arrest of Natasha's stepmother in February on a charge of
second-degree murder.
Graphic
ABOUT THE SYNDROME
Shaken Baby Syndrome is a condition that results when a child is
shaken so hard the brain is dislodged. Jacy Showers, the director of
a group called ``Don't Shake the Baby'' in Pueblo, Colo., said a
survey that group did of 216 shaken baby cases showed that 75
percent of the cases involved children 1 year or younger, but that 4
percent were children 2 to 4.
KEYWORDS: CHILD ABUSE ARREST SHAKEN BABY SYNDROME by CNB