Letter from accused center of court fight

WEST CHESTER >> A man awaiting federal sentencing for an armed robbery in Coatesville in which he was shot six times told a Common Pleas Court judge Wednesday he turned over to police a letter written to him by a young father accused in the shaken baby death of a 5-month-old infant because of his distaste for the crime the man admitted to in the jail-house note.

“Everybody has morals,” said Lawrence Galloway during a suppression hearing in the case of Zion Shockley, who is facing charges of first-degree murder, third-degree murder, aggravated assault, endangering the welfare of children and related counts stemming from the February 2018 death of his daughter.

“But for me, the women and

children thing crosses the line. I’ve never had a thought like that, to hurt my child,” Galloway said, telling Deputy District Attorney Erin O’Brien under her questioning that he had children of his own and learning that Shockley was accused of killing his child disturbed him. “I don’t understand how a person could get to the point to want to hurt their child.”

Shockley’s attorney, Laurence Harmelin of West Chester, wants Judge Patrick Carmody to prohibit the prosecution from introducing the letter from his client to Galloway at his upcoming trial. A jury is set to be selected for the case in October.

Although the letter was not read in court, Harmelin and O’Brien agree that in it Shockley makes statements about what happened the day that his daughter collapsed and was taken to the hospital. Harmelin wants the note suppressed because he claims Shockley, who has a low IQ, did not make the admissions contained in it voluntarily, as is required in police statements.

Harmelin also argued that Galloway had promised not to show the letter from Shockley to anyone, but he eventually turned it over to authorities who gave it to the investigators in the case.

In rebuttal, O’Brien said that Shockley could not claim confidentiality for the letter because he freely gave it to Galloway.

“He voluntarily wrote the letter and gave it to someone else. Once he did that, he has no expectation of privacy,” she told Carmody. In addition, O’Brien said that Galloway was not acting on behalf of law enforcement in soliciting the letter from Shockley, and thus was not operating under the same rules of investigators.

Carmody did not rule on Harmelin’s motion but said he wanted to view it in the context of case law involving such jailhouse information, and in light of Shockley’s reduced mental capacity. He reportedly has an IQ of 61. “It is relevant for me to get the big picture.”

The judge mentioned a past case involving the murder of a young Parkesburg area youth at the hands of a Coatesville youth, Chad Franciscus. The prosecution in the case presented testimony from a fellow inmate at the Chester County Prison about statements Franciscus made implicating himself in the death.

But those statements were later thrown out by an appellate court because they had been gathered by a man who had elicited several such statements from defendants across the region in hope of gaining a favorable sentence — what Carmody referred to as a “professional confession seeker.”

Galloway told Carmody that he had not contacted the District Attorney’s Office about Shockley’s letter in hopes of getting leniency on the robbery charges he faced. He acknowledged that whatever happens with Shockley’s prosecution, he himself was going to spend years behind bars in federal prison.

In May 2019, Galloway, 35, of York, entered a Turkey Hill convenience store in Coatesville and pointed a gun at two workers there, demanding money. The attempted robbery was spotted by a retired state police trooper from Delaware County, who drew a handgun and shot Galloway six times in the abdomen and lower body, foiling the crime.

Galloway was being housed in the medical block of the county prison when he met Shockley, who he said was someone who would help out other inmates. Shockley began assisting Galloway to get to the prison’s day room for meals.

Galloway, who admitted having a criminal history that dated back to when he was but 6 years old, said he began pressing Shockley about his own case. Was he a rapist or a child molester, Galloway asked him?

“He said, ‘No, I’m not a rapist. I’m not a child molester.’” But for months he declined to be more specific about the charges against him, until one day when Galloway suggested he put it in a “kite,” slang for prison notes. “If you can’t say it, write it down,” Galloway told O’Brien he said to Shockley. “A few hours later, I got a kite from the defendant saying what he was in jail for.”

In December 2019, Galloway contacted the D.A.’s Office about the letter and eventually gave it to a prison officer. He gave a recorded statement to Chester County Detective Christine Bleiler, then of the D.A.’s Child Abuse Unit, about the matter.

In February 2018, Coatesville police officers responded to the 500 block of East Harmony Street a report of a 5-month-old girl in cardiac arrest. Paramedics transported the child victim to Brandywine Hospital, and later A.I. DuPont Hospital for Children, in critical condition. Despite extensive medical intervention, the baby died on Feb. 12.

While at DuPont, investigators said the child was found to have both chronic and acute intracranial hemorrhages and extensive bilateral retinal hemorrhages throughout all layers of the retina, meaning she was bleeding from the brain and eyes. These injuries are consistent with abusive head trauma; investigators said such trauma was caused by both recent and ongoing abuse.

Investigators said in the criminal complaint that Shockley reportedly admitted that he accidentally dropped and shook the baby, on multiple occasions, and inflicted the injuries that caused her death.

When Bleiler and Coatesville Detective Jonathan Shave interviewed Shockley, they said he reportedly admitted that he had shaken his daughter in frustration sometime after Christmas 2017 because he was playing a video game and lost. The criminal report states that Shockley said he picked up his daughter and shook her for about five minutes, and he demonstrated on a doll what investigators described as a violent back and forth shaking motion. He added that when he put his daughter down she appeared fine.

He also reportedly admitted that on Feb. 10 he had been playing “Call of Duty” on his PlayStation 4 and he became upset and frustrated when another player told him “he was a failure at the game,” the criminal report states.

Angered by the comment, Shockley told investigators that he threw his daughter up in the air twice, but did not catch her on the second time and she hit a mattress face first, according to the criminal report. Shockley reportedly admitted that he shook his daughter for about a minute, according to investigators. He walked away for water and when he returned, he realized that his daughter was not breathing, the report states.