48 Hours: A mother's fight to prove her son's innocence
Erin Moriarty is a "48 Hours" correspondent. Here, she weighs in on covering the case of Skylar Nemetz, a soldier who says he shot his wife by accident in October of 2014. Her all-new "48 Hours" investigation, "The Soldier's Wife," aired Saturday, May 7.
What would you do if your son or daughter was accused of a crime?
Would you give up everything you owned and go deeply in debt to pay for an attorney? Would you sell everything you had to pay for 24-hour monitoring so your child could be free on bail to meet regularly with that attorney? Would you pull up stakes, leave your home and move nearly 900 miles away to live with him as he waits for trial? And how would you handle the trying days of the trial, watching your child take the stand and gamble with the jury?
This week on "48 Hours,"you will meet a woman who did just that. Her name is Danette Heller.
On Oct. 16, 2014, her middle son Skylar Nemetz--20 at the time-- shot his 19-year-old wife, Danielle. Skylar--an army infantryman who had just returned from a nearly three-week training deployment--told investigators that the shooting was an accident. Detectives initially booked him for manslaughter, but when one army buddy came forward and said Skylar had been angry with his wife, Skylar Nemetz was charged with first-degree murder.
Danette's life was forever changed by her son's actions. She had been living in Park City, Utah and moved to Pierce County, Washington so she could help her son. She went from once living in a sprawling home to sharing a single bedroom with him, rented from a friend.
I became interested in this case, in part, because of Danette Heller's difficult choices. I felt that it would be instructive to watch her journey. I meet parents of defendants all the time who, suddenly and unexpectedly, get a crash course in the complexities and expense of the legal system. These are people who, while usually guilty of no crime, become targets of the same anger, and even vitriol, aimed at their children because of the filial relationship.
Heller is no exception, and today, in a social media world, the criticism fired at her was daily, vicious and unrelenting. It didn't help that Heller, who is a self-described "momma bear," added fuel to the flames by questioning the motives of Danielle's grieving family members.
There was another reason to follow the murder trial of Skylar Nemetz. This is a not a typical ''whodunnit." Skylar admits he shot his wife with the same AR-15 assault rifle he had given her for protection. The only question the jury had to determine was the "why."
If the evidence supported his claim that it was an accident, he was guilty, at the most, of manslaughter. If, however, he pulled that trigger even in a momentary fit of anger, Skylar Nemetz committed the crime of murder.
Forensic evidence, as valuable as it is to determine who committed a crime, is often worthless to establish the "why." The jurors had to look into Skylar's mind to find the "why."They had to weigh his actions, his words to investigators and his own testimony at trial. And they had to struggle with the nagging question: can a well-trained solider, a firearms expert, accidentally kill the person he loves the most?
Twelve strangers, the jurors, probably had no idea that when they decided the future of Skylar Nemetz, they were also shaping the life of Skylar's mother, who gambled everything she had to save him.
