FIFTY STAB WOUNDS IN A SOUTH CAROLINA DITCH; A WINTHROP HUSBAND SAYS THE GUN “SPONTANEOUSLY WENT OFF”; AND A FLINT BRIDE WALKS.

0:03 Caalaroga Shark Media. Good morning, I am Garrett Fisher. Thursday May twenty eighth, twenty twenty six. This is daily crime and Justice. Let me walk you through what we are doing today. First Barnwell, South Carolina, a seventeen year old girl named Maylas Shia Hagg goes for a walk on a February afternoon in twenty twenty four. She is forty weeks pregnant. She is scheduled to be induced at the hospital in a matter of days. She never makes it home. Eleven days later, investigators find her body and her baby's body in a ditch behind a neighbor's house, stabbed fifty times.

0:44 The neighbor is sixty four years old. Her name is Jacqueline Red. On Tuesday, a judge looked at her and said, you are not getting bond. We are going to walk through how police found that ditch and the casual little phrase Reid said on a recorded jail call. That should keep you up tonight. Second, Winthrop, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. A man named Sean Brewer walks into his arraignment Tuesday morning, puts his head down on the table, and cries so hard he physically disappears from camera view. His wife, Jacqueline Berry, is dead shot in the bed she was sleeping. In Brewer's explanation, he says he found a stranger's jacket in his own bedroom, pulled a gun out of the pocket, and the gun just quote spontaneously, went off without him touching the trigger. There is a playbook for this. We are going to read from it. Third Flint, Michigan, a twenty three year old woman named Savannah Collier married a man named James Sharrah on August thirtieth, twenty twenty four.

1:46 Hours later, at the after party, Shira got into a fight with his best man, walked away from it, came back behind the wheel of a vehicle, and deliberately ran his best friend over in the street. The bride was there. She did not call nine one one. On Tuesday, she got two years of probation and the chance to have the whole thing wiped off her record. She stood up and told the judge, I lost everything. We are going to sit with that one. I am Garrett Fisher. This is daily crime and justice. Let us begin. Let us start in Barnwell, South Carolina. Population of the county is somewhere around twenty thousand people. Small place, the kind of small place where everybody knows everybody, and where if you are paying attention, a teenage girl who is nine months pregnant should be somebody people are paying attention to. Nobody was paying attention to her. Mayla. She a hog, seventeen years old. Her mother had already died. She was living with her grandfather and her uncle. She was forty weeks pregnant.

2:48 Forty weeks which, for those of you who have not been through this is full term. The doctor is looking at the calendar, deciding what day to induce you. If the baby does not show up on its own. Mayla, she is an deduction was scheduled for that week. She was days away from being a mother. On the afternoon of February eighth, twenty twenty four, surveillance video catches her leaving her boyfriend's house. She walks toward home, She walks past a park, she walks past the house of a sixty four year old woman named Jacqueline Reed, and then she vanishes. Her family starts to worry that week when she does not show up to her doctor's appointment. She does not show up at the hospital to be induced and look, I am going to be honest with you.

3:30 The fact that it took a miss doctor's appointment for the alarm bells to start going off says something about how invisible this kid was in her own life. Seventeen pregnant, mother gone, living in a house full of men, and the system that was supposed to be tracking her was a maternity scheduling office. The thing that finally pointed law enforcement to where she was, the thing that did the work a community should have been doing, was a pair of air pods. Maeli Sheia's air pods were st ill pinging. Investigators tracked the signal. It led them to the address of Jacqueline Reed, which was on the route Mailashia would have walked home on February nineteenth, eleven days after she went missing. They searched the area behind Reed's home, and in a ditch behind that house, they found her, and they found her baby. The prosecutor at Tuesday's bond hearing, Solicitor Lee Stags, laid out what happened to her. Malashia was stabbed fifty times, knife wounds to her head, her neck, her back, her stomach, her unborn baby, a baby who was days away from being born, also had stab wounds.

4:39 The medical examiner said the baby died from those stab wounds and from the death of his mother. Stab wounds on a child who had never taken a breath of air. Now, when investigators first came to Reed's house, before they found anything in the ditch, they noticed two things. They noticed that she had several rugs drying on her front porch, and the rug smelled a bleach. And they noticed that she was missing a finger, specifically the pinky on her right hand. Reid had been admitted to the hospital on February eighth, the day Malashiah disappeared. Because she had nearly severed that finger. It had to be amputated. Reed told her boyfriend on a jail call that she had cut her finger while she was cutting chicken. Her boyfriend, who give the man some credit was thinking more clearly than she was, asked her a perfectly reasonable question. He said, how exactly did you cut the pinky on your right hand if you were holding the knife, why would you have the knife in your left hand. She did not have a good answer. On that same call, Reed told her boyfriend something else. She said she did not want to stay in the house alone anymore. And then, in what the prosecutor described, she said this quote, there are buzzards in the area. Something must be dead out there, buzzards, vulture circling above her own backyard. Card while the body of a seventeen year old girl and her unborn baby were eleven days into decomposition in a ditch behind her house.

6:08 That is not a slip of the tongue. That is not someone who has no idea what is going on. That is someone who knows exactly what is in the ditch and is making conversation about it on a recorded line. Inside the house, investigators found DNA matching Maleashia in three different locations. Reed had told police repeatedly that the girl had never set foot inside her home. Three locations, three plus rugs soaked in bleach on the porch. And here is the part the prosecutor said out loud at the hearing, and I appreciate her honesty. She said, we have no idea why we do not know the motive. There was, in her words, an ongoing beef between Reed and Maelashia.

6:50 Reid spent time at the house where Meelashia lived. Something between them we do not know what I do not need to know what I am going to tell you what I know. A sixty four year old woman, with no apparent reason that anyone can articulate, decided that a seventeen year old pregnant girl walking past her house was a problem she was going to solve with a knife fifty times, including the baby, and then she dragged them to a ditch, came back inside, threw her bloody rugs on the porch with some bleach, and started telling people the buzzards were probably circling because there was a dead animal out there. That is not a mistake, that is a choice, and then twenty three more choices to cover it up. Reed is sixty four years old. She has now been in jail for six hundred and ninety five days.

7:38 Her defense attorney, Charles Hayes, asked the judge for bond on the grounds that his client has medical issues with her head and shoulders that are not being adequately treated in custody. Judge Cliburne Pope said no. Given the nature of the alleged charges, he said, it is appropriate that bond remained denied. The judge did leave the door open for the defense to renew the motion if the trial has not happened by twenty twenty seven. Both sides told the court they expect to be ready for trial this coming fall. Reed is pleaded not guilty to murder and to the additional charge of causing the death of an unborn child during a violent crime. South Carolina has that specific charge on the books. The unborn baby counts as a separate victim under state law. He should. We are going to be back on this case when the trial starts in the meantime. Malis Shiah Hogg, seventeen years old, forty weeks pregnant, about to become a mother, daughter of a mother who was already gone, granddaughter, niece, girlfriend, friend, walking home from her boyfriend's house on a February afternoon, listening to her AirPods. Somebody has to say her name and her son, who never got one. He is a victim too, South Carolina law says, so so does this show.

8:55 We will be right back. Welcome back to Daily Crime and Justice. I am Garrett Fisher, Winthrop, Massachusetts, a coastal town just northeast to Boston, about eighteen thousand people, the kind of place where you raise kids and walk to the water. Sunday morning, just after eight thirty in the morning, Winthrop police get a call about a person shot. They go to a residence and they find a forty seven year old woman named Jacqueline Berry. She is in bed, she has been shot. She is dead. The man calling them is her husband, fifty eight year old Sean Brewer.

9:39 On Tuesday, Sean Brewer was arraigned in a Massachusetts courtroom on charges of manslaughter and weapons violations and the death of his wife. And here is where it gets interesting because the explanation Brewer gave officers about how Jacqueline ended up with a fatal gunshot wound while she was lying in bed. It is something let me read it to you the way the prosecutor described it in court. Brewer told officers that he had been in the bedroom and started finding items that he said did not belong to him, including, in his telling, a jacket with a firearm in the pocket. So he took the gun out of the pocket of the strange jacket two, in his words, ask his wife about it, and while he was holding it, the gun quote spontaneously went off without him touching the trigger, spontaneously.

10:27 Look I am going to be honest with you. There is a playbook for this. There has been a playbook for this for as long as men have been shooting their wives and trying to figure out what to say to the police about it afterward. The playbook is it just went off. I did not mean to I do not even know whose gun this is. I do not know how it got into my house. Maybe she was having an affair and the strange jacket belonged to the other guy, and I picked it up, and then magic happened, and then she was dead. Page one of the playbook, Page two of the playbook, Page three of the playbook. Officers who served a search warrant at the property recovered the firearm. It is a forty caliber Smith and Wesson.

11:09 Modern semi automatic firearms have triggers. Modern semi automatic firearms do not, as a matter of mechanical fact, just spontaneously discharge while you are admiring them. They go off when the trigger is pulled. That is the entire purpose of the trigger. The trigger is the part of the gun designed to introduce intentionality between the human being holding the gun and the bullet leaving the gun. The trigger exists because guns do not go off by themselves. Investigators with the Winthrop Police Department also noted that initial reports from the scene suggested there had been a verbal argument going on in that bedroom before the shooting. Police did not detail what was said, but the picture they are painting in their charging papers is there was a fight, the gun came out, and Jacqueline ended up dead in the bed she was sleeping in. Now, the Shawn Brewer who walked into court Tuesday morning was not the calm collected man telling officers about jackets and spontaneous discharges. The Shawn Brewer who walked into court Tuesday was a man sobbing so hard he literally could not stay upright. He cried as he was led into the courtroom. He cried through the proceedings. At one point during his arraignment, he put his head down on the defense table, and then the court TV reporter in the room said he appeared to disappear from view entirely, just slid down, crying audibly the whole time. And look, both things can be true. He can be genuinely devastated about what happened in that bedroom on Sunday morning. He can be in real grief real

12:42 human pain can sit in a courtroom next to real responsibility for taking a life. I am not in the business of telling you what is in another person's heart. What I am in the business of telling you is what is in the public record, and the public record says this. Shawn Brewer has a quote lengthy criminal record, convictions for crimes of violence, convictions for drugs, and on Sunday morning, when he allegedly shot his wife in their bed, he was already out of jail on bond, awaiting trial in another case. That trial was scheduled to start on June seventeenth, three weeks from now. The charges in that pending case assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, assault and battery on a police officer resisting arrest. So we have a man with a history of violent convictions out on bond allegedly committing more violence with a firearm he is not supposed to legally possess in a bedroom against the woman he was married to. In the manslaughter case, the judge set Brewer's bond at one hundred thousand dollars.

13:46 In the prior assault case, the judge revoked his bond entirely, which means whatever happens with that one hundred thousand. Brewer is staying in custody for at least the next sixty days. He is scheduled to be back in court for a probable cause here in the manslaughter case on July fifteenth. I do want to take a moment for Jacqueline Berry, because in cases like this, the victim becomes a footnote in her own death, a name and a charging document. While the man in the orange jumpsuit cries on camera, her family set up a fundraiser. The fundraiser describes her as sweet, loyal, loving, and kind. It calls her a nurturer. It says she was a proud sister, daughter and niece, friend and cousin to so many people. Forty seven years old, a sleep in her own bed, Jacqueline Berry say her name more in a moment. Welcome back, Garrett Fisher with you.

14:52 Last case of the day, and this one is going to ask you to hold two things in your head at the same time, because both of them are true. Flint, Michigan, August thirtieth, twenty twenty four. Savannah Collier, twenty one years old at the time, marries a man named James Shira by all accounts, it is a regular wedding vows a reception, a best man named Terry Taylor Junior, twenty nine years old, friends with the groom standing up next to him in the suit the whole picture. After the ceremony, the party keeps going. At some point in the night, the groom, James Sheira, gets into a fight with his best man.

15:33 We do not have a clean public account of what they were arguing about. What we have is what the surveillance video shows. The video shows Shira and Taylor in some kind of physical confrontation. The video then shows Shira breaking off and walking away from the fight, and then the video shows him coming back, not on foot, behind the wheel of a vehicle and according to investigators, deliberately driving into Terry Taylor Junior at a hi high rate of speed. Taylor died in the street. Some of you may have heard this case when we first started covering it. James Shira has already been sentenced earlier this month. On May eleventh, he pleaded no contest to second degree homicide plus operating a vehicle without a valid license and leaving the scene of a crash. The judge gave him thirty years to life. He will be in his fifties at the earliest before he sees a parole board. Tuesday was about his wife, Savannah Collier. Savannah was charged as an accessory after the fact to a felony. The theory of the case from prosecutors was not that she killed anybody.

16:37 Nobody is saying that. The theory was that she was there, she saw it happen, She had a phone, and she did not call nine one one, She got into the car, she left the scene. She did not turn herself in until the next day, almost twenty four hours later. She pleaded guilty Back in the Fall. Tuesday was sentencing. The prosecutor, Mark Ross, did not pull any punches. He said, quote she saw her husband run him over at a high rate of speed, die on the street, get in the car, had a phone and didn't call nine one one or do anything else. She did nothing to help. Savannah, sitting at the defense table next to her attorney, reacted to that.

17:19 According to the reporter in the room, she appeared to want to interrupt her. Attorney, Peter Philpott, conceded that she did not call nine one one, but argued that she did not have access to a phone and that she deserved credit for turning herself in within twenty four hours. And then her attorney said something that I want you to hear. He said, his client has suffered quote three significant losses, the loss of a friend, the loss of a husband, and the loss of a father. Because here is something we have not gotten to yet. Savannah's father, after seeing the charges his daughter was facing in the death of her husband's best man at her own wedding, had a heart attack. He died. He never made it to court. And when Savannah herself addressed the court, here is what she said. Quote Never in a million years would I have expected what happened to happen. I didn't just lose him that day. I lost everything that night.

18:12 I lost my home. My house got broken into, they stole my car, I lost my husband, I lost my family end quote. And earlier in the hearing she said, it was supposed to be the best night of my life. Now, look, I want to be careful here, because both things can be true. It can be true that Savannah Collier is, in some real sense also a victim of what James Shira did that night. She did not pick up a key and turn it in the ignition of that vehicle. She did not aim it at Terry Taylor. She was twenty one years old, in a wedding dress that she had probably been picturing for a year, watching the man she had just married murder his best friend in the street.

18:53 And it can also be true that Terry Taylor Junior, twenty nine years old is dead in the street, and the woman who watched him die, had a chance, even if it was the worst chance she had ever been handed, to call for help, to do something other than get in a car and drive away. There is a moral and legal floor for what a human being owes another human being who is bleeding out in front of them, and that floor is pick up the phone. The judge, Carrie Hannibal did something pretty rare. He said both of those things out loud from the bench while handing down the sentence. He looked at Savannah and he said, I can understand the actions you took. They were still in violation of the law. And then he said this quote, Miss Shira, I cannot imagine a worse outcome on one of those milestone moments in life. The actions of mister Shira were not your fault. However, they have become your problem.

19:48 End quote. Quick aside on the name Savannah told the judge she goes by Shira now took her husband's last name in court Tuesday afternoon while he is sitting in a Michigan Prince and sell for the next thirty years for murder. I'm not gonna comment on that. I'm just gonna note it. Sentence two years of probation, no jail time, and under something Michigan calls the Holmes Youthful Trainee Act. If she completes those two years without any incident, the entire case gets dismissed, wiped, as if it never happened on paper. Look, I do not have a tantrum in me about this sentence. I do not. The prosecutor agreed she was not guilty of killing anybody. The judge applied a statute that exists in Michigan law precisely for situations like this where a very young defendant did something at the margins of a much worse crime. I understand the legal logic. I'm not going to pretend I do not.

20:45 There is a version of this case where Savannah Collier serves five years in a state facility and we look back twenty years from now and ask what on earth we were doing. But the version of this story that I want to leave you with is not the sentence. It is the cost, because while the lawyers are talking about youthful trainee acts and statutory dismissals, there is a real person who is not in this story anymore. Terry Taylor Junior, twenty nine years old. He went to a wedding to stand up next to his best friend. He put on a suit, he held the rings, he gave the toast, and at the end of the night he was lying in the street because his best friend decided that a fight at the after party was going to end with a vehicle. Terry Taylor Junior had a family, He had a life. He had the next thirty forty to fifty years that James Sheira is now going to spend in a prison cell instead of him. We do not have a fundraiser statement to read for Terry tonight.

21:45 We have his name, Terry Taylor Junior, twenty nine, best man at a wedding that should never have ended this way. Somebody has to say his name. That is dailely crime and justice for Thursday May twenty eighth, twenty twenty six. Three cases today. Let us put them back in your hand before you go. Barnwell, South Carolina. Jaqueline Red, sixty four years old, denied bond Tuesday in the murder of seventeen year old Maylashia Hog and her unborn son. Maylashia was forty weeks pregnant, days from being induced. She was stabbed fifty times, so was her baby. Their bodies were found in a ditch behind Reed's home eleven days after she disappeared. Reed has pleaded not guilty. Trial is expected this fall. We will be back on it. Winthrop, Massachusetts.

22:39 Sean Brewer fifty eight years old, charged with manslaughter and weapons violations in the death of his wife, Jacqueline Barry. Brewer told police the gun spontaneously went off. The gun was a forty caliber Smith and Wesson. Bond said at one hundred thousand in this case. Bond revoked in a separate pending violent felony case probable cause hearing July fifteenth, Flint, Michigan. Savannah Collier, twenty three years old, sentenced to two years of probation as an accessory after her husband, James Sharra ran over his best man, Terry Taylor Junior, with a car on their wedding night. In August of twenty twenty four, Shira is doing thirty to Life. Collier Walks under Michigan's Youthful Trainee Act. Tomorrow Friday edition. We will be back with whatever the Court's hand us between now in the morning.

23:30 There is always something in the meantime. If you have thoughts on any of these cases, and I know you do, we want to hear them. Drop a comment on the platform you are listening on, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, wherever you are. Tell us about the Buzzard's line. Tell us what you make of the spontaneous discharge defense. Tell us where you come down on the bride in Flint. We read them and if this show is part of how you start your day, do a friend to favor, send them the link, tell them to hit follow, tell them to leave us a rating. The reason people find this show is because people like you tell them about it. Word of mouth is everything in this business, and you are the mouth. New episode tomorrow morning, same time. Until then, keep your eyes open, keep paying attention to the kids in your community. Pick up the phone when somebody needs help.

24:24 And when you see a gun in a stranger's jacket in your own bedroom, maybe call the cops before you start touching it. Do better. Garrett Fisher Daily Crime and Justice Out. Daily Crime and Justice is a production of Calaroga Shark Media. This episode contains research assistance from artificial intelligence tools. All content has been reviewed and verified by the production team to the best of our ability. This program is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. All individuals named herein are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty in a court of law. The cases discussed today South Carolina versus Jaqueline Red, Massachusetts versus Sean Brewer, and Michigan versus Savannah Collier involve active or recently concluded legal proceedings.

25:12 Charges are not convictions, as noted on air. Prosecutors in the Red case have publicly stated they have not yet identified a motive, and certain factual details in all three cases remain subject to further investigation. Information may contain errors or omissions.