"An Easy Target"

By Ralph Cipriano
for Bigtrial.net

Bernard Shero can be alone in a room with somebody, but he doesn't know who's there until he hears a voice.

"He can't distinguish faces," his mother Bonnie says. "He's done that all his life. He doesn't know it's them until they start talking."

"He has to get this close," his father, Bob, says. He's leaning on his wife's shoulder, peering over her at a menu she's holding inside a Bucks County diner. If Bernard was walking into the diner today, Bob says, he would have had to tell him, "Watch out, Bern, there's a step coming."

Bernard Shero was born with congenital cataracts. Between the ages of six months and seven years, he had 23 eye operations. He's worn glasses since he was 18 months old. He's legally blind in his right eye, and can't drive at night.

Bernard Shero has spent a lifetime peering at the world through thick lenses, and getting too close to people. That's why, Bonnie Shero is convinced, Billy Doe accused her son of rape.

"I think he was an easy target because of his handicap," his mother says of her son. After five years of legal drama, Bonnie Shero is worn out.

"It's been hell, it's been a nightmare," she says. "You wake up in the morning thinking about it. You go to sleep thinking about it. It's on your mind constantly."

And it's about to get worse. On Wednesday, June 12th, the 49-year-old Shero will be sentenced after being convicted Jan. 30 on five sex abuse charges. He's facing up to 57 years in jail.

Bonnie Shero says when Bernard was seven years old, she considered sending him to the Overbrook School for the Blind, but decided instead to mainstream him. Her thinking was, "he has to live in a sighted world."

"Now, I think I made the wrong decision," she says. Her son had a hard time as a kid in public school.

"Kids were cruel to him," his mother says. "They would take his coat. They would take his glasses. They would put thumbtacks on his seat. Lots of times he wouldn't tell us what was going on in school. I had no idea everything that was going on with him."

Bernie wanted to be a special ed teacher, to help kids like himself, but he couldn't find a job. He finally got hired as an elementary school teacher at St. Jerome School, in Northeast Philadelphia.

In 2009, when Billy Doe first made his accusation of sex abuse, Bernard Shero was speechless.

"He was shocked, he was dumbfounded," says his sister Robin. He had to dig out an old yearbook to remember who Billy Doe was, an 11-year-old kid in his sixth grade homeroom class during the 1999-2000 school year. "He didn't remember him off the top of his head," his sister says.

"When the charges hit, our world fell apart," his mother says. "Bernard's world fell apart."

His mom kept telling him, "We know you're innocent. We'll be there for you as long as you need it. We'll always be there for you no matter what."

On the night of Feb. 10, 2011, Detectives Drew Snyder and "Gibby" Brook drove out to the borough of Bristol to arrest Bernard Shero. They knocked on the door of Shero's second-story apartment, but nobody answered. The detectives heard a loud thump inside, so they called the fire department.

The fire department arrived at 10:35 p.m. Using a fire department ladder, Detective Brook climbed up on the roof and entered the building through an unlocked window. The detective handcuffed a groggy Bernard Shero and led him downstairs to unlock the door. 

The cops said Shero had "overdosed' on two sleeping pills he took at 11 a.m. The detectives searched the apartment but could not find any more sleeping pills. They did find a suicide note addressed to "Mom and Dad." An ambulance brought Shero to Lower Bucks Hospital.

From the hospital, the detectives called Robin Shero, and the family raced to the hospital. Bonnie Shero remembers one of the detectives telling her, I didn't want to arrest your son, I wanted to arrest [Cardinal] Bevilacqua.

Robin is an EMT. A nurse let her see her brother's charts. "There was nothing in his blood stream," she says, "there was nothing in his system to say he overdosed."

The family does not believe that Bernard Shero was attempting to kill himself that night; they maintain he took two sleeping pills simply to get some rest.

The police say Bernard Shero was trying to kill himself. His lawyer, Burton A. Rose, agrees.

His family still doesn't believe it.

Five days after the arrest, Bernard's parents moved their son out of his apartment, and in with them.

"It's a small town," his mother says. "When word got out around, everybody thinks you're guilty until proven innocent. He just couldn't live there any more."

Bonnie Shero was traumatized when her sensitive, handicapped son became a villain in the local media.

"Seeing the headlines all that time, seeing his picture in the paper," his mother recalls. "Seeing him accused of doing all those terrible things, that was terrible. I couldn't even put the TV on."

When the trial started, the family was confident Bernard would be acquitted. The victim told a fantastic story, with a bunch of holes in it.

Billy Doe gave authorities three different locations for the alleged rape: in the classroom; in a parked car behind an apartment building and a dumpster; in a parked car on a well-known lover's lane in Pennypack Park.

Billy Doe initially claimed that Shero punched him in the face, wrapped a seatbelt around his neck, and ripped his shirt off. He also claimed that shortly after he was raped, he became violently ill and missed a lot of school. But Billy Doe's report card for that marking period showed zero absences.

"That's why we were so hopeful during the trial," his mother says. "Nothing made sense. We just thought there was no way that people could not see that."

The trial was grueling.

"It was so difficult for me to listen to the testimony against my son," his mother says. "To have him have to sit there and listen to all the lies that he's accused of doing."

Bernard's sister, Robin, works two EMT jobs at night on 12-hour shifts, for a total of 72 hours a week. Yet every day of the trial, she was there in the courtroom, after only a few hours of sleep.

Her brother cried a lot during the trial. Some jurors noticed.

When Billy Doe testified, "He seemed so rehearsed," Bonnie Shero says. "I think he is still a drug addict and he'll always be a drug addict. He is just a lying drug addict."

"He would never make eye contact with anybody," Robin says.

On the witness stand, the prosecutor asked Billy Doe about Shero's demeanor.

"Very inappropriate in how he interacted with students," Billy Doe testified. "He would always come up to students and put his arm around them, hold them close. When he would talk to them, he would almost whisper and would be whispering in their ear, always touchy-feely."

According to Billy Doe's testimony, Shero drove him to Pennypack Park. The boy was riding in the front seat. Shero parked the car and exposed himself in the front seat, before ordering the boy to get in the back seat. Billy Doe's testimony is that he got out of the front door, opened the back door of the car and obediently got in the back seat, where the rape took place.

According to Billy Doe's own cockamamie story, he's a double rape victim about to become a triple rape victim. The predator stalking him is a slow-moving partially blind man. Billy is a nimble, lightweight, 11-year-old sixth-grader. It's broad daylight in a popular park. Billy can run circles around Shero. Why doesn't he make a break for it?

That's what Bernard Shero's lawyer, Burton A. Rose, wanted to know on cross-examination:

Q. You made no attempt to flee?

A. No.

Q. You said that you had already been assaulted twice by Father Avery the previous year and you had been assaulted once by Father Engelhardt, correct?

A. Yes.

Q. This man, this grown adult has exposed himself in the front seat in front of you. You can see what the heck is about to happen. You are 11 years old. You already told the priest [Father Engelhardt] I will kill you if you come near me and you let this situation continue? You don't bolt right then and there?

A. No.

Q. Why not?

A. Because I was scared.

Rose attacked the other inconsistencies in Billy Doe's story:

Q. You told [archdiocese social worker] Louise Hagner on January 30, 2009 that the Defendant ripped your shirt. Do you remember telling her that?

A. No.

Q. Did he rip your shirt?

A. No ...

Q. You told Louise Hagner that after the assault happened, you had to go home on your own and throw the shirt in the sewer. Do you remember saying that?

A. Like I said before, I do not remember what I said to Louise Hagner.

Q. Did you throw a ripped shirt into the sewer?

A. No ... 

Q. You told Louise Hagner that Shero punched you in the face ... Did that happen?

A. No.

Q. You told Louise Hagner that when you were in the back seat, Shero took the seat belt and wrapped it around your neck. Mr. [Doe] did you tell her that?

A. Like I said, I do not remember my conversation with Louise Hagner.

Q. Did that happen?

A. No.

When the jury announced it had reached a partial verdict on nine of ten charges, the Shero family tried to comfort Bernard. "We just kept saying to him, it's alright. They're gonna see the truth, and you're gonna be OK."

Her son wasn't so sure. "I never win," he told his mother.

The judge sent the jury back to see if they could reach a verdict on the final charge.

The jury came back within the hour. Bernard Shero was right; it wasn't OK. The jury convicted Shero on five counts: rape of a child, involuntary deviate sexual intercourse with a child, endangering the welfare of a child, corruption of a minor, and indecent assault.

"My heart dropped," his mother remembers. "We sat in a pew and just cried and cried."

She's crying again at the diner. Bonnie Shero dabs her eyes with a tissue while her husband pats her arm. Bob and Robin Shero are crying, too.

When she can speak again, Robin says, "It was like somebody punched you in the stomach."

"And then," his mother says, "they took him away."

Bonnie Shero's last memory of her son that day was a conversation they had through a glass partition.

She was crying and telling her son she was sorry.

And her son said, "I told you Mom, I never win."

Robin Shero found it hard to keep herself composed in the courtroom, when the verdicts were read. She hopes she doesn't run into Billy Doe some night when she's out on an OD call.

"I'd like to call him a scumbag and punch him in the face," she says.

Bernard Shero spends his days in a 5-foot by 9-foot prison cell at the Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility in Northeast Philadelphia. The cell is furnished with a couple of bunk beds, a commode, a chair and a table.

His cellmate for the past four months has been his co-defendant, Father Charles Engelhardt. Both men are in protective custody. Once a week, one of Father Engelhardt's priest friends shows up to say Mass and serve Communion.

Shero sports a buzz cut from the prison barber. Twice a week, he is handed a disposable razor, so he can shave. At 5-foot-8 and 160 pounds, Shero is 30 pounds lighter than he was four years ago, when his legal troubles began.

"He has his good days and bad days," Robin says.

"We try to be optimistic with him," his mother says. "We do everything we can. He is optimistic that he will be coming home on June 12th, and be granted a new trial."

His mother doesn't share his optimism.

"I do not have faith in the justice system anymore," she says.

And even if some miracle occurs on June 12th, or he wins an appeal, Bonnie Shero still sees a bleak future ahead for her son.

"Bernard's life is gone," she says. "He'll never be able to get his job back. He won't be a teacher any more. He won't be able to get a job anywhere. Nobody's gonna hire him."

Bernard Shero has spent every dollar he had on his legal defense. His family plans to sell off his last remaining possession, a 1996 Suburu, to raise money for his appeal.

"Bernard has lost everything and he'll never be able to gain it back," his mother says.

Meanwhile, Billy Doe is a free man looking forward to a big pay day once his civil suit against the Archdiocese of Philadelphia gets settled. A civil suit that, according to Billy Doe's sworn trial testimony, was filed by a lawyer that the D.A.'s office hooked him up with.

With Seth Williams as our district attorney, this is what passes for justice in Philadelphia. Bernard Shero  will probably spend the rest of his life in jail. And Billy Doe will probably be a multi-millionaire.