The woman at the center of what police in Howard County have for decades simply called “The Jane Doe Case” has finally been identified, and that breakthrough has reunited two of her children.
The woman at the center of what police in Howard County, Maryland, have for decades simply called “The Jane Doe Case” has finally been identified, and that breakthrough has reunited two of her children, who hadn’t seen each other for more than 70 years.
Sarah Belle Sharkey, whose name at birth was Sadie Belle Murray, was found unconscious and beaten in a Woodstock field in July 1971 and died in the hospital from her injuries two months later.
Until Thursday, the identity of the victim in the Howard County Police Department’s oldest cold case homicide remained a mystery. While the question of who killed Sharkey remains, her identification brought closure to two people who had been searching for it for a lifetime.
This breakthrough was made with the help of genetic genealogy, which uses DNA and existing ancestry databases to establish familial relationships and build family trees. After submitting Sharkey’s DNA to a private company in October, investigators found out Charles Sharkey was a direct familial match. He was initially thought to be a distant cousin of the victim.
Then, Howard County detectives were able to locate Charles’ sister, Mildred Cantwell.
Sarah Belle gave birth to Charles and Mildred many years before her death, and both children were placed in orphanages at a young age. They hadn’t seen each other in more than 70 years, and while they had vague memories about being taken to orphanages, neither knew what happened to their mother or siblings.
Sarah Belle Sharkey, whose name at birth was Sadie Belle Murray, was found unconscious and beaten in a Woodstock field in July 1971 and died in the hospital from her injuries two months later.(Courtesy Howard County Police Department)
Sarah Belle Sharkey, whose name at birth was Sadie Belle Murray, was found unconscious and beaten in a Woodstock field in July 1971 and died in the hospital from her injuries two months later.(Courtesy Howard County Police Department)
“Learning about my mother was closure for me,” 81-year-old Mildred, who now lives in Springfield, Illinois, said in a news release. “I always wondered … and I am glad to have that closure. Being reunited with my brother is awesome. He’s the only thing in that family that I remember. The closure is worth everything because I always wondered what happened to her.”
Charles and Mildred now talk nearly every day and are planning to meet in person in the coming months, according to Howard County Police Chief Gregory Der.
“It’s something that I thought would have never happened,” Charles, who’s now 79 and lives in Cleveland, said. “I thought I’d never connect again with my family. I tried there for a while, even traveling to Pennsylvania where we were born and Cleveland where we were adopted. I got nowhere. There was nothing.”
While investigators now know Sarah Belle’s identity, there’s still a lot they don’t know about her and what happened to her. Police believe she was living in Pennsylvania, and aren’t sure why she was found in Howard County.
“The work doesn’t stop here, this is really now where much of the work begins,” Howard County police spokesperson Sherry Llewellyn said at a news conference.
Anyone with information about Sarah Belle Sharkey or what may have happened to her should call the Howard County Police Department at 410-313-7867.
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Two beloved giant sequoias that were scorched in a prescribed burn at Calaveras Big Trees State Park last year now appear likely to recover.
The damage to the ancient trees — named the Orphans — had drawn outrage from some members of the Northern California mountain communities that surround the park, who accused staff of failing to adequately prepare the forest before setting it alight. Officials said they took the proper precautions but that the trees appeared to have been weakened by years of drought, making them more susceptible to a pulse of heat that roasted their massive trunks and killed much of their canopies.
In October, a team of experts hiked to the Orphans to examine them. Both had plenty of green in their crowns and had regrown foliage since the fire,said Kristen Shive, a fire ecologist and assistant professor at UC Berkeley who has studied how much crown damage giant sequoias can sustain.
“I saw two very happy living trees,” she said. “I expect both of them to survive.”
The Orphans, which are at least 500 years old, got their names because they are set apart from other sequoias in the grove. The broccoli-topped giants have long towered over the smaller trees that surround them.
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But the burn that took place last October and November, which was intended to cull vegetation that could fuel a damaging wildfire, blackened their enormous copper-colored trunks and turned most of their green tops brown.
Still, the burn achieved a key goal: regeneration, said Danielle Gerhart, district superintendent of California State Parks’ Central Valley District. Giant sequoias rely on fire to reproduce — their cones open and release seeds only in response to bursts of heat, and flames expose mineral soil in which those seeds can germinate.
People hike to the Orphans in Calaveras Big Trees State Park to pray for their survival.
(Dominique Williams / Modesto Bee)
As a result of the prescribed burn, thousands of sequoia seedlings are growing beneath the Orphans, Gerhart said. Many will eventually perish as they compete for sunlight and water, but a few might grow into the next crop of monarchs.
“We have to have fire that’s hot enough to be able to create that regeneration, and that to me is really exciting,” she said. “It literally is a carpet of green underneath and they’re all little babies.”
Calaveras Big Trees is a haven for local residents, who describe a spiritual connection to the park’s cathedral-like sequoia groves. As the state’s longest continually running tourist attraction, it also serves as the area’s economic engine.
Marcie Powers, former board member of the Calaveras Big Trees Assn., a nonprofit that raises funds for the park’s educational and interpretive programs, said she was thrilled to see new growth. She described the contrast between the trees’ baked crowns and fresh greenery as “stark and stunning.”
After the Orphans were damaged, Powers resigned from the board to found Save Calaveras Big Trees with her husband. The group’s goal is to get the park to do more thinning, mastication and biomass removal, which they hope will reduce the risk of sequoias dying in both prescribed burns and wildfires.
Powers pointed out that the long-term survival of the Orphans is not certain, as the fire weakened the trees and could still result in them succumbing to drought or beetle attacks in the years to come. She said the burn also killed some juvenile giant sequoias between 10 and 40 years old.
“I still feel that had they been more vigilant, they might not have had such severe damage to the Orphans or to the dozen adolescent giant sequoias around them that were outright killed,” she said. “Only a few seedlings will make it to become monarchs, which is why it’s important to protect the ones we have.”
Before the burn, crews raked leaves and needles away from the Orphans’ roots and cleared heavy vegetation and downed limbs within a 20-foot radius of their trunks, Gerhart said. Still, she said, it’s impossible to prepare the forest to the point where a prescribed fire carries no risk of mortality.
“As much as none of us want that to happen, it is still a possibility,” she said. “Fire is not an exact science.”
Even so, when any tree dies — including a giant sequoia — that reduces competition for resources, allowing other trees to thrive, she said.
“I think the key is we have to start thinking about these as dynamic ecosystems again, rather than as museum pieces, where we naively think we can keep every single one of them around forever,” Shive said.
She and other giant sequoia experts have watched the debate playing out between local residents and park officials with trepidation, fearing the backlash to the burn could jeopardize efforts to safeguard other ancient groves.
Giant sequoias grow naturally only in a 60-mile band of forest on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada. Though they need fire to thrive, they are no match for the massive, high-severity wildfires that have become more common over the last decade, scientists say. Nearly 20% of the giants’ population are estimated to have died in just three fires in the southern Sierra in 2020 and 2021.
Experts blame a combination of climate change, the dispossession of Indigenous people who once stewarded the land and management decisions like aggressive fire suppression and industrial logging for creating denser, more flammable forests in the Sierra.
These conditions are capable of stoking hotter, faster-moving fires that can race up into the crowns of sequoias, incinerating the massive trees. Without action to restore these lands to something more closely resembling their precolonial conditions, many more sequoias will be lost, the experts fear.
“Part of how these forests evolved is with fire. By us excluding it all this time, we’ve created such a horrendous problem that a lot of trees are dying,” said Brent Skaggs, a contractor with the nonprofit Fire Restoration group.
“We need to own up to that and take steps to restore fire back in these ecosystems,” said Skaggs, a retired Forest Service fire management officer for the Sequoia National Forest and Giant Sequoia National Monument.
He acknowledged that even the most careful prescribed fire could kill some mature giant sequoias. But on balance, the practice is key to protecting the trees that remain from catastrophic wildfires that will wipe out much larger numbers, he said.
“Folks love the Orphans,” he said. “I understand that — I love sequoias myself. There’s a worry, though, that if you don’t allow the natural process to occur because you love them so much, you’re going to love them to death.”
Since the controversy, Calaveras Big Trees State Park has moved ahead with more prescribed burns, including a 39-acre one in the park’s North Grove last month that appears to have gone as planned, Gerhart said. A much larger, 1,300-acre burn is planned for the South Grove this fall. Officials had hoped to ignite it this week, but the area is still too wet from recent rains.
Crews have been preparing for over a year by clearing vegetation away from the bases of giant sequoias, thinning and masticating smaller trees, hauling off large logs and reducing the amount of vegetation around a road that surrounds the burn area, Gerhart said.
The uproar has redoubled the park’s commitment to transparency and public education, she added.
“I think it just reminded us that the community cares so much and we are responsible for what’s going on in the park and we want to share that with people,” she said. “We’re all here together. We all live in this community.”
WASHINGTON, D.C., April 24, 2023 (Newswire.com)
– Chairman of the Iraqi Children Foundation David Collins today saluted the Khudairi Group, saying, “The Iraqi Children Foundation is pleased to recognize the extraordinary corporate philanthropy of the Khudairi Group. For more than a decade, the Khudairi Group of businesses has provided support for education, legal protection, nutrition, medical care, and social support for some of Iraq’s most at-risk children.”
The Khudairi Group’s support includes funding and in-kind donations, like a bus that ICF converted into a “Hope Bus” classroom with food, education, and social services for orphans and street kids. Khudairi corporate leaders have also shouldered leadership responsibilities to ensure delivery of life-changing services to children in a nation suffering from the aftermath of war, violence, and displacement.
Aziz Khudairi, Chairman and CEO of the Khudairi Group, said of the company’s commitment, “The young children of Iraq today will be the leaders of tomorrow, so we need to prepare them for the future as much as we can, regardless of their status and upbringing. It is part of our social responsibility.”
ICF Executive Director Elizabeth McRae highlighted the role of Khudairi Group leaders in navigating the landscape in Iraq. “It is not enough to just want to help Iraqi children. We need the right skills and experience to ensure high-impact results for the children we serve. The Khudairi Group leadership has played a critical role ensuring that outcome.”
ABOUT THE IRAQI CHILDREN FOUNDATION ICF intervenes in the lives of children who are at risk of abuse, neglect, and exploitation by criminals, traffickers, and extremists. With corporate and grant support, ICF has made a life-changing difference for thousands of vulnerable Iraqi children: orphans, street kids, child laborers, child victims of trafficking, and disabled children. ICF is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charity (EIN 26-1394773). Donations are tax deductible to the extent allowed by law. For more information about corporate sponsorship and grant support, please contact: liz@iraqichildren.org or visit www.iraqichildren.org
“Papa died last night, but his death is not the end.”
Those are the first words Veronica Fletcher uttered to her three children after her husband, Joseph Fletcher, died from Covid-19 on April 11, 2020.
“We’re going to keep papa’s name alive,” Fletcher, 49, later told her children. “He lives in us.”
The Fletchers’ 17-year-old son, Joshua, recalled the day his mother told him about the death of his “papa”: “It’s so real, but not real at the same time,” he said. He says he felt compelled to step into his father’s shoes as the eldest child.
“Being a better role model for my siblings,” he told CNN. “Instilling things that I learned from my father that they might not have the opportunity to have because they didn’t have as much time with him that I did.”
Joshua, his younger brother, Zachary, 14, and sister, Maddie, 10, are among the estimated 238,500 Covid orphans in the United States whose lives have been upended in the past three years by the loss of a parent or primary caregiver, according to the Imperial College London COVID-19 Orphanhood Calculator. Globally, there have been more than eight million Covid orphans since the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic in March 2020.
Orphanhood increases the likelihood of poverty, abuse, delayed development, mental health challenges and reduced access to education, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Veronica Fletcher grew up an orphan – her father was not present during her childhood and her mother died when she was nine.
“To be able to usher my children through this loss, it comes from 40 years of pain and knowing what that little nine-year-old girl needed and received,” said Fletcher as she recalled the day she learned of her mother’s death. “To lose a parent is traumatic, and the way the parents were lost during the pandemic, to have to grieve in isolation, that compounds the pain exponentially.”
Christopher Kocher is honoring those who died from Covid and supporting those who survived through his organization, COVID Survivors for Change. The group offers resources and programs to families like the Fletchers. It also pushes for legislative and cultural change. Kocher says much more needs to be done for Covid orphans.
“I was in New York on 9/11. I know how much the city and the nation stepped up to support those families,” Kocher told CNN. “We need to see something similar here. We’re fighting to make sure that we hear a lot more from the president, from the states around the country and from local communities to make sure that they are providing the support that these children need.”
Targeted efforts are gaining traction in many states, albeit slowly.
California state Sen. Nancy Skinner helped her state become the first in the country to pass legislation in June 2022. She introduced a bill strengthening the HOPE (Hope, Opportunity, Perseverance and Accountability) Account law she authored last year. That law made California the first in the nation to create savings accounts for children who lost a parent or guardian to Covid. The California State Budget Act of 2022-23 included $100 million to fund the HOPE program.
California is one of six states that accounts for half of national caregiver loss. New York is another state and has become the second in the nation to introduce legislation that would fund scholarships for children who lost a parent or caregiver to Covid. Each qualifying student would be eligible for a scholarship that covers the equivalent cost of SUNY tuition, plus room and board, books as well as supplies.
New York’s legislation, if approved, would come too late for Joshua Fletcher’s first year of college. “I got accepted into schools that I wanted to go to, but I couldn’t afford to go to them because papa died,” he said. However, Joshua would be eligible for his remaining years of college.
Asian, Hispanic and Black families are more likely to experience a loss, with Black families, like the Fletcher family, twice as likely to suffer from a Covid death, according to the National Institutes of Health.
“Pain is pain, trauma is trauma,” Veronica Fletcher said. “This power is turning your pain into purpose. Those are the kinds of lessons that are helping my children to find hope, to be resilient, to know that they’re not alone. It helps you to help someone else.”
It’s why Fletcher now finds support through external groups, such as COVID Widow Sisters, which connects grieving wives across the country. Fletcher also plans to start her own organization, Widows Tears Collective, a support group for women who have lost loved ones to the illness.
“Especially early on the pandemic, you didn’t get to say goodbye. You didn’t get to be in the hospital. You didn’t get to hold their hand. That loss impacts you dramatically and sits with you for a really long time,” Kocher said. “When that loss is for a young person, someone who’s losing a parent, it’s a really different kind of loss.”
