Word: cave
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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They were fourteen average Texas citizens, a mix of young and middle-aged, eight men and six women, but as the days went by Sharon Cave watched this Austin jury leave behind the mundane to confront the unthinkable. Over and over again, they viewed photographs of her 21-year-old daughter, her body mutilated and dismembered, and listened to hours of gruesome testimony, only to be told at the end of each day to go home to their families and friends and keep what they had seen and heard to themselves. Watching their struggle, Cave was convinced these jurors...
...They deserved some help. Like the overwhelming majority of American jurors in murder and abuse cases, the 14 Austin jurors had to face unspeakable horrors without the benefit of the psychological assistance afforded to both policemen and victims. Cave has turned to State Rep. Juan Garcia to sponsor a bill funding a jury counseling program in Texas state courts for those cases where graphic, disturbing evidence is often featured - homicide cases, sexual offenses, family-relations crimes such as child abuse. The bill, which would give additional funds to victims' assistance programs, is gaining support in the legislature. While victims' advocates...
...have come to take jurors for granted," Cave says. "They saw the pictures over and over again, pictures I have never seen. I asked 14 people to take my pain and the hell that doctors and psychologists and friends have begged me not to look at. I watched as the days went on and I began to see people who had not slept, people with dark circles and pallor, people with nervous twitching...
...Cave knows those kinds of symptoms all too well. In August of 2005, her 21-year-old daughter Jennifer was killed by Colton Pitonyak, 22, a University of Texas finance major with a drug habit. Jennifer had dropped out of college, but was trying to get her own life back on track after some problems with drugs and had begun work as a legal assistant. After Jennifer failed to return home from a dinner out with Pitonyak, Sharon, a Corpus Christi small business owner, and her boyfriend, Jim Sedwick, drove to Austin and began the search. When...
...road is Sigiriya, the extraordinary rock fortress built in the 5th century, and widely hailed as the eighth wonder of the world. The ruined capitals of Anuradhapura, founded in the 4th century B.C., and 900-year-old Polonnaruwa are a shortish drive away, and so are the cave temples at Dambulla, which date from the 1st century B.C. They're so amazing - and so amazingly well preserved - that you could stay in a hut and be happy. But how much better to return, after a hard day communing with history, to a fabulous Ayurvedic massage, a herbal bath infused with...