Norfolk prosecutor's work has a purpose: protecting children

NORFOLK

Sometimes the children's autopsy photos leave Jill Harris so bereft that nothing helps but hugging her own son as hard as she can.

"It never gets easier," she said.

In her seven years as a prosecutor with the Norfolk commonwealth's attorney's office, Harris has prosecuted hundreds of cases of child abuse and neglect, including almost a dozen cases in which a parent murdered a child.

This year, Harris again has been assigned to prosecute several defendants accused of murdering their children. Among them are Heaven Smith and Corey Bryant, charged with killing one of their 10-month-old twin daughters through neglect. Another is Anthony Huhn, accused in the death of his son, 7-week-old Ethan, through suffocation as he lay face-down on a blanket with 13 broken ribs after drinking a bottle laced with an adult sleep aid. Ethan's mother, Alisha Huhn, has been convicted of felony child neglect.

Harris is quick to point out that she is not the only prosecutor capable of handling such cases, and others in the office have brought to trial defendants accused of murdering a child. Still, she has prosecuted several high-profile infanticide cases in Norfolk over the past few years, and has lent her expertise to other jurisdictions.

Two qualifications help her prepare: For nearly 10 years before she became a prosecutor, she worked as a nurse. Her medical knowledge helps her wade through technical and daunting medical reports, especially for children who have died from multiple forms of neglect.

Her pleas to judges and juries on behalf of the children are impassioned by another qualification, her motherhood.

"I would say I could never understand why people do these horrible things," Harris said. "After having a child I could understand it even less."

Nancy Drew novels led Harris to law.

She read them as a girl, savoring the crime stories and the mysteries. But her high school job as an aide in a home for the elderly first took her in a different direction - to nursing school.

She loved taking care of the elderly and she admired the staff at the home, she said. Law school seemed so far away.

She got a three-year nursing degree, and then a bachelor's degree. It was while she worked weekend shifts as a nurse that she decided to go to law school after all.

"Everybody who worked weekends was in school getting Ph.Ds and MBAs," she said.

When she graduated from law school, she continued in both careers full time, litigating civil cases during the week and nursing on weekends. She felt drawn to criminal law and joined the commonwealth's attorney's office in 2001.

"Something I was hoping for was the juvenile team," she said. "I love children. I knew I wanted to be a part of helping children (harmed by) physical and sexual abuse."

She landed on the team. One of her first cases involved a brutal attack on a 13-year-old girl. The defendant, Leon Young, had dragged the girl from an apartment stoop and sexually assaulted her behind a bar. He beat her when she tried to talk, sometimes choking her into unconsciousness.

A male colleague took the lead on the case. But the victim was uncomfortable talking to a man about the attack. Harris met with her repeatedly, building up a rapport so the girl would feel confident talking with her, and later, testifying.

Young later pleaded guilty to malicious wounding and attempted sodomy, and was sentenced to 25 years in prison, with 10 years of that time suspended.

"It was emotionally upsetting to see what she had been through, and difficult to see her go through a jury trial and relive all that," Harris said. But the payoff, she said, was more than Young's conviction.

Harris grew to admire children's resilience, and their ability to forgive. She treasured the relationships she built with the victims, which continued long after the end of the cases. The victim in the Young case still calls Harris. The victim in another rape case asked Harris to adopt her.

"The reward you get is wonderful," Harris said. "You get nice thank you notes, people who keep in touch and tell you what a difference you've made in their lives."

She needs no notes to remember the names of the children who died.

The first two cases she handled, in 2002 and 2003, both involved fathers who killed their infant sons by shaking them violently. Roy Lee Owens pleaded guilty to second-degree murder of his son, Damion. Chaddrick Piper pleaded guilty to malicious wounding and assault and battery. Piper was not charged with murder because his son, Kharell, died more than a year after the incident.

"I remember him well," Harris said in an e-mail. "A beautiful, chubby-cheeked baby. He was blind, deaf and severely brain-damaged from the violent shaking. Yet I remember his beautiful smile and how he loved snuggling when I held him."

Since then, Harris has prosecuted some of the most gruesome child-death cases in Norfolk: 2-month-old William L. Hunter, who died when his parents, Michael and Pamela Mullins, starved him; 2-month-old Syleena Mingo, who died from beatings that began within two weeks of her birth, as well as starvation and meningitis caused by the injuries and food poisoning at the hands of her mother, Stepfanie Mingo, and grandmother, Angela Mingo.

"What really stood out - she had the most beautiful eyes, yet the saddest eyes I've ever seen," Harris said.

Harris said she's proud of her work on that case: Angela Mingo was sentenced to serve 40 years; Stepfanie Mingo was sentenced to 25 years.

Dr. Suzanne Starling is a forensic pediatrician who often examines the victims of child abuse, and later works with Harris as she prosecutes cases. Harris' medical background helps tremendously in preparing for those trials, Starling said.

"You skip the part where you have to teach basic medical words and go right to the part where you say this is what it means to you as a lawyer and to your case," Starling said.

Starling said Harris' background helps her serve as a knowledgeable voice for the victims.

"She basically stands up and takes the child's side," Starling said, "here's what the child felt, here's what the child went through. She's able to paint a picture to a judge and jury."

Defense lawyer Kenneth Singleton recently faced Harris in a child-abduction case.

"It's tough going up against Jill," he said. "She's a good prosecutor, and she's passionate about the victims in the case. That passion comes through."

Often, when Harris looks around the courtroom, she discovers that she is the only one there to represent the child who died. Family members often support the defendant.

"My role is to speak for that child and make sure that justice is served," she said.

Harris' office is decorated with snapshots of her son, a toddler. She asked that his name not be printed, and was reluctant to talk about her personal life. But when she talks about her son, it's as if none of the sadness that comes with her job exists.

"I do try to separate my work life from my personal life," she said. "I try not to think about it when I get home."

Harris said she tries to approach each case fairly and to do what's right. Sometimes she needs to take a few minutes to go to a bookstore or to take a walk when reviewing the evidence becomes too much.

Other women in the Norfolk office also found that motherhood wrought a powerful change in how they perceived abuse cases.

Prosecutor Val Bowen recalled returning from her own maternity leave and taking on a case involving a baby boy scalded by his mother when he wouldn't stop crying. As she looked at the pictures, Bowen couldn't stop thinking about how similar the boy looked to her own son, who was about the same age.

"You draw on your own experience as a mother," she said. "You think about all the other choices they had.... Most parents would exchange places with a child that's suffering, and these people are inflicting the pain."

Commonwealth's Attorney Jack Doyle said prosecutors such as Harris need to see the facts of a case and make them real to a judge or jury.

"Sometimes that includes pain. It's necessary for justice to be done for that to be brought into court," he said. "Certainly, being a mother, she can bring that reality into the courtroom."

Harris said she always hopes to hear a defendant offer an explanation that makes sense. She never has.

"It's usually them taking the opportunity to talk about themselves as a victim," she said.

During the case against Angela Mingo, Harris felt herself getting angry while reading the woman's statement, in which she called the child "stubborn" and blamed the infant for not eating.

"It's an emotional thing when a baby dies," she said. "I'm not going to present it in an expressionless way. I want the jury to look and know that this child is the victim.... What he should be doing, he should be playing Spider-man. He should be riding his bike."

Michelle Washington, (757) 446-2287, michelle.washington@pilotonline.com