Last Dance, Last Chance

girls.”
    After going to Catholic school, Sharon attended the University of Kentucky on two scholarships. “Moving to Lexington was like going to a foreign country for me. I had my bags packed every weekend to go home, but I stayed. I majored in English because that’s what my scholarships dictated.”
    Her then husband was working toward his master’s degree, and Sharon worked as a cocktail waitress in a country club in Louisville. “That was an experience because I was a Yankee—the only one who ever worked in that country club. On Sundays, they had a dance floor in the front, and they’d open up a beer garden in the back for people over 21 who didn’t belong to the country club. My job was to sit on a bar stool and pat people down for weapons!”
    Coming to Buffalo with her husband, who wouldn’t consider moving to New Jersey, Sharon graduated from the University of Buffalo with a degree in philosophy and criminal justice. “I always called my curriculum ‘head in the sky—feet on the ground.’”
    It took her a long time to finish by going to school at night. Along the way, Sharon gave birth to her two sons.
    The courses she took at the University of Buffalo were the perfect combination for the job Sharon would have in the nineties. “I didn’t know it then, though,” she said. “I also think that good cops use life experience—bad things that happen to them that they turn into knowledge. I had my share of those.”
    Initially, Sharon had wanted to go to law school. She took her first LSATs to prepare for that, “and I did terribly,” she laughed.
    She waited to take the law school aptitude test again, and volunteered at the rape crisis center in the interim. “I went through training there and did a year of volunteering, and then the coordinator’s job for the Erie County Advocate Program for Sexual Assault Victims opened up in 1979.”
    It was only part time to begin with, a fledgling program, but Sharon was hired. She realized that she was doing exactly what she was meant to do. She was a natural.
    Before long, the experimental program became a full-time job—more than full time, really. Sharon was always on call as an advocate for victims of sexual assault, and of course her hours were never nine to five. She wore a beeper and was summoned at all hours of the day and night.
    Seeing how many agencies become involved in sexual assault cases, Sharon wrote a protocol so that when a victim came into a hospital in Erie County, her office was automatically notified so the victim wouldn’t have to go through the procedures alone.
    “I lost half my volunteers the first year because I told them we had to respond. The hospitals had been disillusioned because they hadn’t always been able to count on advocates. I went to the hospitals and guaranteed that someone would show up—which meant I had to go to half the calls myself. When I started, we had two hospitals who called us; when I left, we had eleven. We had a program with credibility, and we had lots of volunteers we could count on.”
    When Sharon stopped to think about it, she realized the job was making up for a marriage that wasn’t working. She and her husband divorced.
    Sharon Simon wrote grants and gradually was able to hire other advocates for her one-woman office. “It was only me to begin with,” Sharon recalled. “When I left fourteen years later, there were six staff members, and we’d expanded to helping victims in court cases, opened a speakers’ bureau, and taught prevention programs. I was trained by the best; I traded off teaching with the FBI so I could go to their classes, and I never thought about taking the LSATs again.
    “But there came a point where I was teaching in the police academy, teaching police officers, teaching the doctors—but I realized I wasn’t learning anything, any more.”
    Sharon had handled at least 8,000 sexual assault cases when she was hired by the Erie County District Attorney’s office on November 1, 1993. Although she once said she wanted nothing to do with murder, she would be going to homicide scenes, too. She had seen the stress in sexual assault cases, and she sensed that the stress had to be so much more in homicide cases. It was.
    Sharon soon wrote another proposal on what might be done to help victims, their families, hospitals, the detectives, the medical examiners, and even the funeral homes who were called in to murder crime scenes.
    For the first two months, she learned