From NC WANTED Staff

Posted: Aug 31, 2007
Updated: Apr. 3, 2009

NC WANTED reveals survivor stories about victims who live to tell. 

A featured case is the attempted murder of Sherry Bean of Aberdeen.

Sherry Bean doesn’t remember the night it happened. She doesn’t remember the two days before it happened, nor does she remember the agonizing months that followed.

When she woke up in the Jaycee Burn Unit at UNC, her right arm was gone, and she didn’t know why.

Gradually, she learned: On March 25, 2003, at about 8 a.m., a couple of men working on trees in the area found her in an abandoned shed. They thought she was dead until her leg moved. She had been beaten in the head with a brick. Then, pine straw and sticks were placed on top of her body and she was set on fire.

Sherry had third-degree burns over 40 percent of her body, and underwent a series of operations and skin grafts. For months, she wished she had died in the attack – balking at physical therapy and refusing to get out of bed. But her mother, Patricia, pleaded with her daughter. Patricia – and many times her husband, David – would drive three hours a day to be with their daughter. Often Sherry’s 5-year-old son, Travis, would come too.

“My parents, my family kept saying, ‘Well, Sherry, if you’re going to give up, we’re going to give up. If you don’t want to try, we’re not going to try,’” Sherry said. “And I couldn’t, as much as my mother and father had been through, I couldn’t just give up. I had to try.”

She went home in February, 11 months after the attack.

Sherry was a drug addict. She was a bright child, a tomboy who grew up in Randolph County. By high school, she started hanging out with the unpopular group, the “out crowd,” as she called them in a recent interview. She started smoking marijuana, and by her early-20s was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a diagnoses she blames for giving her access to the prescription drugs she eventually abused. Sherry soon discovered crack-cocaine, and by the time of her attack was smoking crack every day.

She doesn’t remember what happened, but said she probably was doing a lot of drugs on the night of the attack, even speculated that she was attempting to trade prescription drugs for street drugs and never lived up to her end of the bargain.

Four days after the attack, while Sherry lay heavily sedated in the burn unit in Chapel Hill, an 18-year-old man was arrested on attempted murder charges for Sherry’s attack. Despite his age, David Rashawn Shaw had been arrested several times before, on charges ranging from assault on a female to cruelty to animals.

According to court documents, David’s stepfather went to Southern Pines Police not long after the attack. He allegedly told them David entered his bedroom in the early morning hours of March25 with blood on his shoes, and made comments that suggested he had hurt a woman. A preliminary hearing was held and David’s stepfather, Marshall Hollmond, denied ever making the statement to police. Unfortunately, his statement was never signed and all the charges against David Shaw were dismissed.

Hollmond has an extensive record that includes arrests for assault against a female and writing worthless checks. Efforts to locate him were unsuccessful.

Shaw sits in a jail cell less than 20 miles from where Sherry lives. He's serving time for second-degree kidnapping for shooting a man in the abdomen in August of last year. He initially was charged with assault with a deadly weapon with intent to kill but those charges were dismissed in March, when he began his current sentence. Before that, he served three months for robbing a convenience store in June 2005. Shaw, who is scheduled for parole in November 2008, did not respond to NC Wanted’s request for an interview.

The Southern Pines Police Department did not want to discuss what happened with Shaw in detail, but conceded they brought evidence to the magistrate, who authorized an arrest warrant. They are optimistic the case will be solved one day and believe there are people in the community who have the information that could close the file.

Sherry, too, would like to see an arrest but has a more grim view of things. First of all, she says, a person capable of such a heinous and brutal act is likely incapable of regret. She would like to know why but is not so naïve as to think that her attacker could ever be sorry for what he did.

More troubling, though, is her feeling of guilt about her current condition. Since her release from the hospital, her left arm has been amputated and she finds herself crying when she tries to put on jeans and can’t, or has trouble opening a box of macaroni and cheese.

“You know the worst thing is I have forgiven the person who did this to me. I haven’t forgiven myself. I have a lot of regrets, self-pity,” she said. “My mother and father’s only daughter, and when they see me every day, they have to think about what happened. And that’s always going to be there. I mean, it’s not like I can hide my scars.”

But some things help, like a room full of students’ faces, captivated as she tells them about the tragedy she endured. One day, she says, if she gets up the courage, she’ll be a motivational speaker and warn children about the dangers of drug use for a living.

Until then, she keeps going – for her son, for her mom and dad and because she can. She’s a survivor.

“The person that did this to me, if I gave up, they would win. And I’m not going to let them do that. I’m stronger than that,” she said. “I’m a better woman than that. And if I give up then this person wins and they’re not going to beat me.”