Witness: Wife blamed dentist after car struck him
Posted on 01/25/2003 6:31:33 AM PST by MeekOneGOP
Witness: Wife blamed dentist after car struck him
Defense says video may suggest husband wasn't hit multiple times
01/25/2003
HOUSTON - A woman who rushed to aid an orthodontist after he was run over outside a Houston hotel last year testified Friday that she heard the man's wife blame him for the attack.
" 'David, look what you made me do,' " Julie Creger said Dr. Clara Harris told her husband after running him down with her Mercedes-Benz.
Ms. Creger was one of several witnesses to describe the scene July 24 where David Harris, 44, died. His wife, a dentist, is accused of killing him after finding him with another woman.
Friday afternoon, prosecutors played a much-anticipated videotape filmed in the hotel's parking lot that night by a private investigator who Clara Harris, 44, had hired to follow her husband.
But the two-minute videotape, shot from a distance, doesn't show the initial impact. A muffled scream can be heard as it shows a silver car speeding and then driving in circles as other people run toward it.
Prosecutor Mia Magness pointed at something white in the lower right corner near a bush, saying it was David Harris' body. The back wheels of the car could be seen going up and over something, but viewers couldn't tell whether the obstruction was a body or something else.
Clara Harris covered her face and cried while the videotape was played. Jurors showed no response.
"She is just a bundle of nerves, and she is an emotional wreck," her attorney, George Parnham, said after the trial wrapped up for the day.
He said the videotape could help in her defense because it did not show the car reversing or going back and forth.
"It seems to me that it was descriptive of the chain of events that contradicted much of the eyewitness testimony," Mr. Parnham said.
Prosecutors say Clara Harris ran over her husband after he spurned her when she discovered him with the woman. The confrontation came at the same hotel where the Harrises were married on Valentine's Day a decade earlier.
Defense attorneys say Clara Harris "lost it" and didn't intend to kill her husband but only wanted to keep her marriage and family together.
Ms. Creger said that when she reached David Harris, she used a towel to soak up some of the blood that was coming from his head and put her finger in his mouth to try to clear his airway and ease his breathing.
When she pulled out her finger, one of his teeth fell out.
"I removed it and set it on the concrete next to his head," she said. "I realized there was no more help I could give him ... I told him that he needed to keep breathing. That I knew it hurt. That it was going to be OK."
Ms. Creger said she then tried to calm a teenage girl, later identified as David Harris' daughter Lindsey, who was crying hysterically. The witness said the girl told her she was in the car with her stepmother, who struck her father.
" 'Sweetie, did she mean to do this?' " Ms. Creger recalled asking Lindsey.
"What did Lindsey say to you?" prosecutor Magness asked.
"She said, 'Yes,' " Ms. Creger replied.
Another witness, Norma Ramos, testified that David Harris told his wife after she had a physical confrontation at the hotel with the other woman, Gail Bridges: " 'This is over! No more! It's over! It has ended!' "
When defense attorneys cross-examined Ms. Ramos, she said David Harris didn't seem shocked or embarrassed that his wife had found him at the hotel with Ms. Bridges.
If convicted, Clara Harris faces up to life in prison. If jurors determine she acted under the legal definition of sudden passion, they could consider a lighter sentence of two to 20 years in prison.
The trial is expected to last up to three weeks.
Vast! i told you he asked for it!!
LOL!
This is why most men will do almost anything to avoid having a long conversation with a woman...
We know that eventually she'll say something like this and our heads will begin to hurt.
it is terrible because a man lost his life, but i cannot stop laughing over this story. i saw the video last night and she was gunning for him...
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Our "advanced" criminal law now seeks to punish those who act crazy out of passion and betrayal as if they were calculating sociopaths.
Our problems with domestic violence, as opposed to stranger violence, would be much reduced if people could just stay out of the cheatin' side of town.
Two unidentified supporters of Clara Harris stood outside the Harris County Criminal Justice Center in Houston holding signs of support Thursday on the first day of her trial. She ran over and killed her husband last year.
The woman's sign reads....
I am vegetable
sex-kitten
and
I want
evrithing
that Clara has
I will ran over
over and over
How is next?
There is not
haw to stop me.
A man's sign Reads:
I
want
to
be Lake
Clara
The only "issue" Clara had was her husbands fooling around. Something he flaunted towards the end making his employees and many others very uncomfortable.
The prosecutor will not bring one witness that will say anything negative about Clara. They won't be able to provide anyone that will say things like "she was hotheaded", "a bitch", "mean", etc. Not one. There are none.
She was the business brains behind their dental "empire" they were building together. He was a sometimes a hotheaded jerk that was full of himself and was no saint. IF anyone was a saint Clara was close.
That's the way the modern phrase has evolved, so you are "right," inasmuch as that is how people do say it nowadays. The original verse (from a contemporary of Shakespeare's whose name escapes me at the moment) goes :
"Heaven hath no spite like love to hatred turn'd
Nor Hell fury like a woman scorned."
The saying has gone through the same concatentation as "To gild the lily," which Shakespeare used to express the idea originally that something was as useless as trying to "gild refinéd gold, to paint the lily" white.
Oh, I don't know about that...
I don't value every life equally. Truth be told, there are some lives that I don't value at all, and this guy sounds as though he might well have been a good candidate for that category.
Actually, it's a shame that taxpayer's money has to be spent here at all...
Two people had a problem.
One of them solved it.
I just can't find a way to convince myself that it's any of my business.
And under the circumstances I'd give her 20 years to life.
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