UC student who failed to stop murder faces expulsion calls

The Associated Press LAS VEGAS -- Jeremy Strohmeyer and his buddy were two weeks shy of high school graduation when they met a 7-year-old girl eager to play hide-and-seek in a casino arcade. Two hours later, Sherrice Iverson was found strangled in a restroom stall. She had been sexually assaulted. Last Monday, Strohmeyer, 19, went on trial for his life, charged with murder. His friend, David Cash Jr., will be a key witness. Sherrice's mother thinks Cash should be a defendant. Strohmeyer lived in an affluent neighborhood of Long Beach, Calif. He was an honor student who excelled in physics and calculus, a popular member of the Woodrow Wilson High volleyball team. Friends describe him as bright but deeply troubled. He and Cash were best friends. That bond, Cash says, prompted him to walk away the night of May 25, 1997, when he saw Strohmeyer assaulting the girl at the Primm Valley Hotel, a cluster of three casinos in Primm, Nev., 43 miles southwest of Las Vegas. While Strohmeyer has languished in the Clark County Detention Center, Cash, also 19, has enrolled at the University of California at Berkeley, where hundreds of protesters on August 26 demanded he be expelled. "He was in the bathroom? and he didn't do [anything] about it," said the girl's mother, Yolanda Manuel. "He could have stopped it. I'm very outraged. He is an accomplice to murder." Many at the rally felt Cash should be tossed out of the university, where he is studying nuclear engineering. But UC-Berkeley Chancellor Robert Berdahl said the university could take no action because Cash had not been charged with any crime or violation of the campus' student code. "I think we have to understand the thing that protects all of us is due process," Berdahl said. Prosecutors know Cash will be a vital witness in the trial, which is expected to last up to three months. They also note that no Nevada statute outlaws witnessing a crime and failing to stop it. State legislators say they intend to change that next year. In the months leading up to the killing, friends say, Strohmeyer got mixed up in a world of pornography, drugs and alcohol. He visited pornographic Web sites on the Internet. Prosecutors found hundreds of pornographic pictures on his computer, although the defense claims the teen was sent the pictures and didn't ask for them. Two days later, Strohmeyer, Cash and Cash's father stopped in Primm en route to a Memorial Day weekend in Las Vegas. At the Primm Valley Hotel, Sherrice and her brother, Harold Jordan, 14, were playing in the arcade at 3 a.m. while her father, LeRoy Iverson, gambled in the casino. Three times, security guards said they found the girl alone and told her father to come get her. Video surveillance cameras captured Sherrice meeting Strohmeyer and Cash in the arcade and much of what followed: The girl began playing hide-and-seek with Strohmeyer, who had been clowning with Cash. They playfully tossed wet paper towels at one another, but when Sherrice threw a janitor's "wet floor" sign at him, Strohmeyer became angry. The girl darted into the women's restroom. Strohmeyer followed. Cash entered a few minutes later. Cash said he peered over the wall of the wide handicapped stall from the adjoining stall and saw Strohmeyer with his hand over Sherrice's mouth, muffling her screams, and told him to let her go. "I knew at that point that the little game that they were playing kind of crossed the line," Cash said. He said he left the restroom at that point. Strohmeyer later confessed to sexually assaulting girl, then strangling her. Shortly afterward, Cash has said, Strohmeyer told him he'd killed the girl. That night, Strohmeyer, Cash and Cash's father continued on to Las Vegas, then returned to California on Memorial Day, May 26. Classmates identified Strohmeyer and Cash from surveillance videotapes released to the media. Strohmeyer was arrested May 28, moments after swallowing 37 Dexedrine pills in an apparent suicide attempt. Strohmeyer has said Cash had nothing to with the crime, but Sherrice's mother, Manuel, calls him an accessory to murder and has led a petition drive in Los Angeles, gathering some 20,000 signatures, calling for criminal charges. Manuel, a school cafeteria worker, is estranged from Sherrice's father. She blames him for the girl's death. Manuel and Iverson have filed separate lawsuits against Strohmeyer and the resort, claiming the hotel was negligent in not supervising the arcade. With the videotape, Cash's testimony and the three confessions Strohmeyer made to police after his arrest, defense attorneys Richard Wright and Leslie Abramson have major hurdles to overcome. Abramson, best known for defending Lyle and Erik Menendez, the brothers sentenced to life in prison for the 1989 murder of their parents, has portrayed Strohmeyer as a naive, immature teenager who was taken advantage of by police. Clark County District Attorney Stewart Bell is seeking the death penalty.

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