Slain officer's daughter fights parole bid - again

Dear Grandpa, the words begin, I didn't even get to know you. I was only two when a heartless, selfish man took you from your family.

They're just words on a website. But they bring tears to Jonna Sharp every time she reads them.

The lines are a simple memorial written by her daughter about Sharp's father, Patrolman Sanford Stanley Jr. of the Coshocton Police Department, who was shot and fatally wounded in the town's small police station in 1976. His death robbed Sharp of a father, but it also robbed her children of a grandfather and mentor.

She said the pain is as real today as when she got the news of his death while babysitting at her sister's house. She said it's a pain that grows every time she has to fight to keep her father's killer in prison.

Sharp, who followed in her father's footsteps and became a Muskingum County deputy sheriff in 1993, has appeared before an Ohio parole board four times to plead with it to keep 66-year-old Paul McNeely locked up.

McNeely was convicted in 1977 of aggravated murder and sentenced to die in the electric chair. A little more than a year later, however, the Ohio Supreme Court threw out the state's death penalty, commuting the sentences of 101 Death Row inmates to life in prison and granting them the possibility of parole.

McNeely goes before the parole board again Feb. 16.

About six months before each of his hearings, Sharp begins collecting signatures of family members and fellow law-enforcement officers to help her keep McNeely in prison. She urges them to visit www.blockparole.com, a website that will send the signatures and comments left on the site to the parole board before the hearing.

Sharp said that every signature and letter is a reminder of what she lost. She broke down in tears at her home in Zanesville last week when asked about memories of her father.

" My dad was buried on my 20th birthday. Every year on my birthday, I think about that," she said later in an e-mail. "My children and grandchildren are missing out so much by not having their grandfather and great-grandfather alive to share stories with.

" It is so unfair that we have to fight to keep him in prison," she said of McNeely. "It would be even worse knowing he was granted parole."

Her husband, Bob Sharp, said he can't comprehend why the state would allow a man sentenced to die for killing a police officer a chance at freedom.

Mr. Sharp said there's no dispute about the facts of the case: On July 19, 1976, Stanley pulled McNeely over after watching him hit a bridge abutment with his truck on Rt. 16 in Coshocton. He let McNeely go without a ticket.

According to court records, McNeely went home and got a 12-gauge shotgun, a .22-caliber pistol and a .22-250 rifle, filled a bag with ammunition for each gun and went looking for Stanley. He parked across from the downtown police station and waited until he saw Stanley inside.

He then entered the station through an unlocked side door and shot Stanley once with the shotgun. Stanley tried to get away, but McNeely followed, firing shots from the handgun. Stanley collapsed in front of the building and was taken to a hospital, where he died 15 minutes later.

McNeely has never given a reason for the killing, which has baffled prosecutors and even the prisoner's former friends. He testified at trial that he drank heavily that day and did not remember anything from before the traffic stop until after he was arrested.

McNeely expressed regret for the killing in a letter he penned to a Dispatch reporter after his first parole hearing in 1991.

" It's like I told the parole board, there is no one more sorry about this man's death than I," he wrote. "No matter what he said or did to me, he did not deserve to die. I will take responsibility for my actions because I reason that I did it."

Sharp's family doesn't believe the sentiment is sincere.

Jonna Sharp makes no apologies for hoping that McNeely never gets released. She said granting him parole would dishonor her father's memory and belittle the loss felt by her children, who never got to know their grandfather - the loss she sees in her daughter's poem.

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