‘None of this had to happen’
A woman lost her life in Chesapeake, and a repeat abuser is sent to court again
From the parking lot of the Red Roof Inn, a witness could see Sammi Jo Burkhart screaming. When police arrived, Burkhart was standing at a motel room door, visibly shaking, an officer wrote in court documents.
She told them her ex-boyfriend, Ma r k Ha r l e y O’Leary, grabbed her arm and pulled her into the room as she tried to leave, court documents say. She grabbed the door frame but couldn’t hold on. After the argument, O’Leary fled in his car, police said.
It was about 11 p.m. on Nov. 14. Virginia Beach police arrested O’Leary a few hours later and charged him with misdemeanor assault.
He wasn’t locked up long. According to the Virginia Beach Sheriff ’s Office, a magistrate released O’Leary on bond Dec. 29.
Five weeks later, the 37-year-old Burkhart was dead.
O’Leary now sits in a different jail, this time in Chesapeake, charged with first-degree murder, breaking and entering, abduction and numerous gun counts in her death. Burkhart’s family believes the criminal justice system failed her. More could — and should — have been done to protect her, relatives said.
Documents filed in courthouses across Hampton Roads show O’Leary had a history of harming and threatening women. And the 40-year-old had repeated run-ins with the law that escalated in the months leading to Burkhart’s death.
O’Leary’s public defender in the murder case, Erik Mussoni, declined to comment. From jail, O’Leary also declined an interview request.
Just days before Burkhart was killed, another woman with whom O’Leary had been involved — the mother of his children — took out numerous felony charges against him in Norfolk, accusing him of assault, abduction, and breaking and entering while armed with a weapon, records show. He’d been convicted of threatening her before.
If O’Leary hadn’t been let out on bond in Virginia Beach, or if Norfolk police had captured him on the new charges, Burkhart’s family wonders if she’d still be alive. Brea Hawk, Burkhart’s aunt, said there needs to be accountability, perhaps a change in the law, to protect women like her niece.
“He should have never been let out,” Hawk said.
Abduction
Burkhart and O’Leary dated on and off beginning in April last year, and Hawk said O’Leary was “extremely possessive right away.”
She said Burkhart always wanted to believe the best of people, even when they weren’t deserving. She had a vivacious personality. A lot of people knew her.
“She never really had it easy, but she always kept that smile on her face,” Hawk said.
Hawk, related to Burkhart through marriage, also is O’Leary’s aunt by blood. Burkhart and O’Leary were not related to each other.
O’Leary’s felony record dates back at least seven years.
In June 2014, he pleaded guilty to threatening to bomb or burn and was sentenced to serve three weeks behind bars. O’Leary told the mother of his children that she “needed to watch her back” and that he was “going to set the house on fire and kill everyone,” prosecutors wrote in a summary of their evidence filed in Norfolk Circuit Court.
A month later, he was sentenced to serve 1 ½ years in a different Norfolk case, convicted of burglary and grand larceny for breaking into a man’s house and stealing cash and a television, records show.
In 2017, a Norfolk judge sent him to prison once more.
Early one morning in February 2016, a woman who was in a relationship with O’Leary had just arrived home from work when he grabbed her from behind and dragged her into the back seat of her car, court documents state. The woman lived in the home with her mother; O’Leary was living there, too.
O’Leary locked the car doors and assaulted her, punching her in the head and ribs.
He put his hands around her neck and squeezed for “like 10 seconds,” until she couldn’t catch a breath and her vision began to fade, according to her account. She screamed for her mother to call police, and O’Leary jumped behind the wheel, tried to pull her into the front seat by her hair and started driving fast.
A block or two away, he stopped and told her to get out, prosecutors wrote. He took off with her purse and cash. O’Leary pleaded guilty to abduction, strangulation and assault and battery of a family member.
A judge sentenced O’Leary to 11 years with seven suspended. O’Leary remained imprisoned until March 10 last year. He moved in with a relative and met and started dating Burkhart soon after.
New charges and threatening texts
Seven months after he got out of prison, O’Leary was in trouble again.
In October, he was charged in Chesapeake with unlawful dissemination of an image and contributing to the delinquency of a minor, both misdemeanors. Court documents filed in Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court show O’Leary was arrested on the charges Nov. 11.
The alleged assault on Burkhart at the Red Roof Inn happened three days later. Hawk said Burkhart had tried to end the relationship several times. After the incident at the motel, she had cut off communication with him.
One month after O’Leary was released from the Virginia Beach jail on the charge of assaulting Burkhart, the mother of his children took out the new felony charges in Norfolk. A magistrate also issued an emergency protective order barring O’Leary from contacting or going near her, Norfolk Juvenile and Domestic Relations District Court records show.
Five days later, shortly before 3:30 p.m. on Feb. 3, Chesapeake police were called to a house in the 1600 block of Chesapeake Avenue in South Norfolk.
Burkhart had been shot multiple times. She was rushed to a hospital, where an emergency room doctor pronounced her dead, police wrote in a search warrant affidavit filed in court.
A man told a police detective that O’Leary held him and Burkhart hostage in an upstairs apartment for several hours, police wrote in the affidavit. Burkhart tried to escape, and O’Leary shot her before fleeing, the man told police.
The man said O’Leary sent Burkhart threatening text messages, including a photo of a handgun.
Hawk said the man was an ex-boyfriend of Burkhart’s and had been taking care of her dog.
Police found O’Leary in Norfolk two days after her death. He’s being held in the Chesapeake city jail — this time, on no bond. A court date is scheduled for late April.
A Louisiana State Police trooper has been suspended without pay for kicking and dragging a handcuffed Black man whose in-custody death remains unexplained and the subject of a federal civil rights investigation.
Body camera footage shows Master Trooper Kory York dragging Ronald Greene “on his stomach by the leg shackles” following a violent arrest and highspeed pursuit, according to internal State Police records obtained by Associated Press.
The records are the first public acknowledgment by State Police that Greene was mistreated, and they confirm details provided last year by an attorney for Greene’s family who viewed graphic body camera footage of the May 2019 arrest and likened it to the police killing of George Floyd last May in Minneapolis.
The video shows troopers choking and beating the man, repeatedly jolting him with stun guns and dragging him facedown across the pavement, the attorney told AP.
State Police have repeatedly refused to publicly release the body camera footage. The agency has been tight-lipped about Greene’s death and initially blamed the man’s fatal injuries on a car crash outside Monroe, Louisiana.
York, who turned his own body camera off on his way to the scene, is seen on other body-cam footage yanking Greene’s shackles and repeatedly using profanity toward Greene before he died in custody.
“You’re gonna lay on your (expletive) belly like I told you!” the trooper says at one point, according to the police records.
York was suspended without pay for 50 hours following an internal
investigation that also led to the termination of another trooper, Chris Hollingsworth, who died in a single-car crash after learning he had been fired over his role in the incident. The AP last year published a 27-second audio clip from Hollingsworth’s body camera in which he can be heard telling a colleague, “I beat the ever-living (expletive) out of ” Greene before “all of a sudden he just went limp.”
“It is now undisputed that Trooper York participated in the brutal assault that took Ronald Greene’s life,” said Mark Maguire, a Philadelphia civil rights attorney who represents Greene’s family. “This suspension is a start but it does not come close to the full transparency and accountability the family continues to seek.”
Col. Lamar Davis, who took over as State Police superintendent last year, wrote York that his suspension had been decided by his predecessor, Kevin Reeves, adding he “would have imposed more severe
discipline” had it been up to him. Reeves made the decision during his last week in office, before stepping down amid a series of scandals, but York was not notified of the reasons for his suspension until Dec. 29.
York’s attorney did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
York told investigators he turned his own body-worn camera off because it was beeping loudly and that his “mind was on other things” after arriving at the scene.
“I didn’t think about it,” he said.
The trooper who initially chased Greene, Dakota DeMoss, was recently arrested in connection with a separate police pursuit last year in which he and two other troopers allegedly used excessive force while handcuffing a motorist. Those charges followed a monthslong internal investigation into use-of-force incidents involving troopers in the northern part of the state.
It’s not clear whether DeMoss has been disciplined in Greene’s arrest.