Empty Promises

cars, bad debts, gambling.
    Sherri didn’t think about hiring a criminal defense attorney at this point.
    Shortly before 2:00 P.M. on October 10, the 911 operator received an emergency call to send help to Education Hill in Redmond. An aid unit had already responded to the Sherers’ address, and the Redmond investigators arrived in time to see them carrying Steve Sherer from his garage.
    He had apparently tried to kill himself with carbon monoxide. When the first units arrived, they found him in his garage in his Blazer, with the windows down, and the engine running. He appeared to be semiconscious and had trouble speaking or moving.
    Detective Steve Hardwick leaned over him and said, “Hang in there, Steve. You’ll be all right.”
    His condition appeared critical, so the paramedics called for an airlift to the ER at Harborview Hospital in Seattle for treatment of carbon monoxide poisoning. As the helicopter disappeared to the west, the Redmond detectives looked into the front seat of Steve’s truck. A picture of Jami in her wedding dress rested there and, beside it, a cordless phone. Steve himself had used it to call for help.
    He had also taken the time to leave a long good-bye:

I am sorry Everyone
    BUT
    Jami is my life. She made me a better person and kept me under control. But I kept hurting her with games I would play.
    I can’t live without her. I really need her and I have lost her one way or another. Maybe now, she won’t be afraid to come home. I have been a real bad person in the past and she has changed me. But I had ruined what we had!
    Jami Honey. Just remember I really do love you and Chris, and Chris when you can read and understand this, Please understand that I need your Mom real bad and if she won’t come back, I won’t be able to handle that, much less your life. Please give everything to Chris and/or Jami. They are the ones I’ve made suffer.
    I didn’t mean too! [Sic]
    Love You ALL
    Steven Sherer
    My dad’s ring goes to Chris when he is married.

    Was it a sincere plea for forgiveness from a man who had lost the center post of his life, or was it a carefully contrived letter meant to make him look innocent? Steve Sherer had seen the devastation and the guilt that suicide could bring to a family when his father took his own life. The detectives wondered how he could do that to his own son. Chris had no mother, and now it looked as though he would have no father, either.
    Sherri Schielke and Steve’s younger sister Laura rushed to Harborview Hospital and sat anxiously in the waiting room while doctors treated him in the emergency room. Detective Steve Hardwick waited with them there. He couldn’t talk to Steve Sherer because he was on a respirator, but the doctors told him that he was not in critical condition, nor had he ever been. He had called 911 in plenty of time to be rescued.
    Hardwick waited for hours to speak with Sherer; it was almost midnight when he was allowed to go in. Steve’s mother and sister hovered nearby, and Hardwick had only ten minutes to talk to Sherer alone.
    “I told him no matter what he had done, it was not worth taking his life,” Hardwick recalled. “I reminded him that he had to think about his son. He was reflective, somewhat remorseful. He continually made comments such as ‘I’ve made bad mistakes,’ and ‘It’s all my fault.’ He also mentioned that ‘I’m going to miss Jami.’ ”
    This struck the detective as somewhat strange since no one was convinced yet that Jami was gone forever. But Steve apparently was: he had begun to speak of Jami in the past tense.
    The next morning, Detectives Hardwick and Conrad returned to Harborview, hoping to interview Steve about the reasons for his attempted suicide. They learned to their surprise that he had already been discharged and taken across the street to the mental health center. No sooner had they located him and asked how he was feeling than Steve’s new attorney arrived. He was Peter Mair, a former assistant U.S. attorney and now one of Seattle’s better-known criminal defense attorneys.
    Mair, hired by Steve’s mother, directed the detectives to stop questioning him immediately and asked them to leave.
    When Hardwick asked about Steve Sherer’s taking the polygraph exam, Mair looked at him and said, “I’ll get back to you on that.”
    It would be weeks before Steve Sherer was released from the hospital, ultimately frustrating weeks for the Redmond investigators. They were working