Philadelphia Inquirer
Wednesday, Feb. 25, 2004

Jury still deliberating Schiebers' Phila. suit

By Joseph A. Slobodzian,
INQUIRER STAFF WRITER

The federal jury considering the lawsuit filed against the City of Philadelphia by the parents of murdered University of Pennsylvania graduate student Shannon Schieber yesterday completed a second day of deliberations without reaching a verdict.

The civil jury of six women and six men, which began deliberating shortly before 2 p.m. Monday, spent seven hours reviewing evidence from the eight-day trial before breaking for the day.

The jury returned to court only once, to ask to have read back the testimony of a police official who in 1998 performed a review of how the police Sex Crimes Unit handled rape complaints.

The jurors are to resume deliberations this morning at the federal courthouse in Center City. If the jury determines the city is liable in Schieber's death, it will return to court to hear oral arguments from lawyers for the city and Schieber's parents on the question of the amount of damages to be awarded.

Sylvester and Vicki Schieber of Chevy Chase, Md., are seeking $3.8 million for the death of their 23-year-old daughter, a doctoral candidate at Penn's Wharton School at the time she was sexually assaulted and strangled on May 7, 1998, by serial rapist Troy Graves.

The Schiebers' lawsuit contends that a police practice of downgrading rape complaints enabled Graves to prey on women in Center City during 1997 and ultimately to murder Schieber eight months later.

Lawyers for the city maintain that the theory behind the Schiebers' lawsuit is too speculative and that the city should not be held liable for the assaults of a cunning serial criminal such as Graves.

After his 2002 capture in Colorado after eight sexual assaults, Graves, 25, was convicted of attacking four Center City women in 1997, murdering Schieber, and attacking a sixth Philadelphia woman in 1999. He is now serving a life prison sentence in Colorado.