Jury finds woman guilty of manslaughter; no verdict reached on kidnapping

CHARLESTON, Mo. — After three hours of deliberation, a Mississippi County jury found Savannah Davis, 29, of Sikeston, Missouri, guilty of second-degree involuntary manslaughter for causing the death of John Sharber in 2014.

Davis, who was the only witness called by the defense during the second day of the trial, admitted to hitting Sharber with her car in the parking lot of the Sikeston Wal-Mart but maintained it had been an accident, her brakes had been faulty, and she hadn’t seen Sharber — with whom she had been having an affair — until he already was being pulled under the hood of her car.

She also admitted to putting Sharber in the back seat of her car and driving to several locations before leaving him in the parking lot at Saint Francis Medical Center in Cape Girardeau and fleeing to Arkansas.

The jury also found her guilty of leaving the scene of an accident but was unable to reach a verdict on the other charge Davis faced, kidnapping.

The first witness to testify Wednesday was detective Flint Dees of the Sikeston Department of Public Safety.

During Dees’ testimony, Lawson played an audio recording of an interview Dees and other officers conducted with Davis after apprehending her in Blytheville, Arkansas.

The two-hour recording reflected much of what Davis later would say on the stand. During the taped interview, Davis said she had taken Sharber in the back of her car in the hope he would regain consciousness and corroborate her claim she had not meant to hit him.

On the tape, she explained to detectives what happened between the parking lots of Wal-Mart and Saint Francis Medical Center. She said she first went to a nearby construction site where she knew Sharber to be working, where she tried waking him. He wouldn’t wake up, she said, but he continued to breathe, make groaning sounds and squeeze her hand over the next several hours.

Upon hearing police sirens she assumed were looking for her, Davis then took Sharber — and her cousin, who had been in the car the entire time — to Morehouse, Missouri.

She drove back to Sikeston to drop off her cousin before driving to Cape Girardeau.

Davis, who is black, said on the witness stand one of the reasons she decided not to take Sharber to the hospital in Sikeston was because she feared what would happen if she showed up at the hospital with a married, unconscious white man who was 30 years her senior and with whom she was having a sexual relationship.

“Sikeston is racist,” she told Lawson under cross-examination.

She adamantly denied she and Sharber had been arguing immediately before the incident.

Instead, she said, she had been looking for gas money, and Sharber often gave her money and even helped her move into new apartments on more than one occasion during the course of their four-year relationship.

She also said one of the reasons she fled the Wal-Mart parking lot was because she previously had been banned from the parking lot and was afraid she would get in trouble for trespassing.

When she got to Cape Girardeau, she decided to go to a friend’s house instead of the hospital because she saw police cars parked at a nearby construction site, she testified.

After what Davis said was 10 to 15 minutes at her friend’s apartment, she covered her license plates with paper towels and wore a plastic bag with eyeholes to hide her face while she dropped Sharber in the parking lot.

Lawson questioned Davis about her past criminal history, which includes convictions for stealing and child endangerment and said in his closing statement to the jury Davis went “here, there and everywhere over Southeast Missouri trying to play doctor and [did] a poor job of it.”

Lawson has until Wednesday to decide whether to re-try Davis on the kidnapping charge because the jury was unable to reach a verdict.

Public defender Susan Warren said the convictions each carry a four-year sentence, and the two years Davis already has served will be subtracted from that total.

tgraef@semissourian.com

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