Mom SNAPS After Getting Kicked In The Stomach
And you grabbed that gun, and you walked over, and you murdered him. That is not true. How is that not true? That’s That is what happened. That’s not what happened. You cannot tell me that you I couldn’t just grab a gun and kill him in his sleep. Susan Jacobson and Marvin Neil James, they were a couple living together.
They had an ordinary domestic arrangement. Susan was pregnant with their second child together. She was already 9 months along by late February 2015. The couple shared a home, a bed, and the complications that come with any intimate relationship. My name is Cameron. Welcome to True Red Crime. This is the case of Susan Jacobson. Now, Marvin had been married twice before, and both of his ex-wives would later describe him as emotionally abusive during their respective marriages to him.
Susan had her own traumatic history that she carried with her, including experiences from her childhood that she rarely discussed with anyone. The relationship between Susan and Marvin was troubled in ways that weren’t always visible to outsiders. Susan would later tell doctors and law enforcement that Marvin had been physically abusive. She reported he had kicked her in the stomach during a previous pregnancy, and that the violence continued into her current pregnancy.
Her OB/GYN and family physician both confirmed Susan had reported physical abuse from Marvin before the events of February 2015. So, of course, these were not allegations. She didn’t say this only after the murder. These were concerns she had raised with medical professionals while the relationship was ongoing. Now, in the days leading up to February 20th, 2015, Susan said Marvin had been angry with her.
There was tension in the house that had been building, though the specific reasons for his anger weren’t clear. But what is known is that late that night, something happened and it would change both their lives forever, but in very different ways. According to Susan’s account to law enforcement, she was asleep in bed, Marvin woke her up, kicked her in the stomach, and of course, she was 9 months pregnant at the time.
She was carrying their child and due to give birth at any moment. She told police Marvin was yelling at her and that he was sick of her and didn’t want the baby. In that moment, Susan made a decision. She got out of bed, she grabbed a gun, and she shot Marvin in the head while he was lying in bed. Let me show you some of her police interview.
So, how did he kick you guys when you were laying down? Yeah, we were laying down. So, you started to kick? What happened? Um And where did he kick you? He kicked like it was right here. You know, but I have I You have pillow and yeah. Did you have a pillow between you and him? Yeah, and there was only one pillow between So, he kind of kicked the pillow? Which kicked her out of the bed? I can’t remember exactly what he said.
It was just He didn’t say I’m going to kill you, but I knew that’s what he meant. I’m I don’t know if I can remember exactly that part, but I instantly Then I instantly I Yeah, I went into panic mode. You know, first I’m scared because I know he’s mad at me. I always get scared when he starts yelling. So, Where was he when you shot him? He was in bed. He was laying down? Mhm.
I don’t know if he was laying down or or up or what, but he was He was still in bed. He was still in bed. Yeah. Now, of course, her explanation for this action was stark and simple. She believed that whoever got the gun first was going to be saved. Marvin died from the gunshot wound to his head, but Susan did not call police right away.
Instead, she tried to clean up the scene of the shooting. She wrapped Marvin’s body in a tarp and moved it to a window nearby. She disposed of the bloody bedsheets that would have shown what happened. She took the gun and buried it. She put it somewhere where it would not be found. For 2 days, Susan kept what happened to herself. She didn’t tell police.
She didn’t call 911. In fact, it was 2 days later, February 27th, that she finally reported the shooting to police. Now, when the sheriff interviewed Susan about what happened, she told him that she took his life in self-defense. She explained the history of abuse, the kick to her stomach, she was heavily pregnant, and Marvin telling her he didn’t want the baby.
She feared him in that moment, and she reached for the gun. Again, let me show you from her police interview. I am totally telling the truth. I You are What What you’re telling me is not true. I don’t understand. To what you’re saying. You’re saying You’re talking about how you were being abused and this, but I think Marvin was sleeping at the time.
He was not sleeping. He was laying in bed, and you grabbed that gun, and you walked over, and you murdered him. That is not true. How is that not true? That’s That is what happened. That’s not what happened. You cannot tell me that you I couldn’t just grab a gun and kill him in his sleep. That’s what you just explained to me you did.
No. He was laying in bed, and you went and picked up that gun, and you went back, and you murdered him. I did not. You did. I did not. I need you to start telling the truth. This is why This is why I was afraid, because I see this happening to people that on the news, that the innocent people get sent to prison.
Innocent people don’t wrap the body in a tarp and trash bags after you just killed your husband. And then stack tables up and try and make a ramp to a window so you can load him into the back of the vehicle, clean up the mess, bag up the sheets. I considered it. I was I was in a a state of mind where I didn’t know what to do.
And the reason you didn’t call the police is because you knew he was dead. That what you did. So. That’s not true. I panicked. You didn’t murder him. That’s not true. How long have you been thinking about this? I haven’t been thinking about it. Susan. I’ve been fearing for my life. Susan. It’s time to stop this charade.
It’s time to just Susan, I don’t understand. I I I’ve never done anything wrong in my life. I was protecting myself. I felt I was protecting my kid, my baby. You may very well be right thinking you were protecting your kid, but that doesn’t change the fact you know, that night I think he was asleep. Okay. He wasn’t asleep.
And maybe you were afraid. Maybe you were afraid from, you know, the torment, but I you know, your your story’s not adding up about him waking up in the middle of the night. She went on to describe a relationship where violence had occurred. She was pregnant previously. He was violent towards her then. So, just a few days after her arrest, Susan then gave birth to her second child, but she didn’t take that baby home.
The state took custody of both of Susan’s children and began proceedings to terminate her parental rights. This meant that in addition to facing criminal charges for Marvin’s death, Susan was also fighting to maintain her legal relationship with her children. Now, as part of the proceedings, two mental health professionals evaluated Susan. You had Dr.
Chris Linsky, a psychiatrist, and Dr. Patricia Rose, a psychologist. Both of them spent time with Susan. They assessed her mental state and her ability to parent her children. During these evaluations, Susan told them about the abuse. She said she had suffered at Marvin’s hands. She described a pattern of physical and psychological abuse throughout their relationship. Dr.
Rose’s evaluation took place over two days. Much of it was based on what Susan told her directly about her experiences. Parts of the evaluation was self-administered, meaning Susan sat alone to answer questions on a questionnaire and had time to think about her answers before returning to Dr. Rose. The doctor didn’t look at any physical evidence of abuse, and she didn’t interview other people to verify or contradict what Susan was telling her.
It was all based primarily on Susan’s own statements, and the doctor concluded Susan was suffering from PTSD. She also had a panic disorder and an unspecified depressive disorder. The doctor stated Susan had been the victim of psychological and physical spousal abuse and had been exposed to extreme marital distress. However, Dr. Linsky’s his evaluation was shorter, lasting about an hour and a half.
And like the doctor, he based his conclusions primarily on what Susan told him, along with the information that was already in Dr. Rose’s report. He also diagnosed Susan with PTSD. And in the trial, Dr. Linsky testified Susan seemed honest in her answers and appeared sincere to him. Dr. Rose similarly testified Susan was cooperative.
She took the evaluation seriously and she was forthcoming. She seemed to want to answer the questions accurately. However, there was something important that Susan didn’t tell either doctor during these evaluations. See, when the detectives interviewed Susan, she had disclosed that when she was younger, her mother’s boyfriend had sexually assaulted her.
When Susan told her mother about these assaults when she was younger, her mother did not believe her. This was clearly a traumatic experience from Susan’s past, but when the doctor specifically asked her to disclose any prior traumatic events during the evaluations, Susan didn’t mention these assaults at all.
She left this significant piece of trauma out of the information she provided. Now, both doctors made it clear that their evaluations were conducted specifically in relation to Susan’s ability to parent her children. They were not evaluating her mental state at the time of the shooting. In fact, they intentionally avoided discussing the events surrounding the death when they evaluated Susan.
This was done on the advice of Susan’s attorney and Susan did not answer questions related to the shooting during this process. Now, during her criminal case as it moved forward at trial, her defense team wanted to use the PTSD diagnosis from the doctors as evidence. They believed these diagnoses would help support Susan’s claim that she’d been a victim of domestic violence and had acted in self-defense.
However, the prosecution disagreed. They filed a motion to prevent any testimony about Susan’s PTSD from being presented to the jury. Susan’s attorneys also wanted to present testimony from another expert, Dr. Hibbert, who would talk about the effects of pregnancy hormones, specifically increased cortisol levels in the late stages of pregnancy.
The idea was that this testimony would help explain Susan’s mental state on the night of the shooting. Given that she was 9 months pregnant at the time, the prosecution also moved to exclude this testimony. So, the judge had to decide whether to allow this evidence at Susan’s trial. And the judge ruled that the PTSD diagnosis would not be allowed.
So, you have to understand that the PTSD was purely based on what Susan told the doctors. There was no independent verification. The doctors had essentially taken Susan at her word when she said Marvin abused her. They didn’t look at any physical evidence or any medical records beyond what Susan told them directly.
They did not interview any other witnesses whom I have seen or known about the alleged abuse. So, the judge was concerned that allowing the PTSD diagnosis into evidence would essentially be allowing the expert witnesses to vouch for Susan’s credibility. And in this, she’s the only witness. The judge felt this would improperly take away the jury’s role as the ones who decided what testimony to believe.
Now, there was also the problem of information Susan had left out that I mentioned before. Dr. Linsky had testified that PTSD doesn’t come from just one relationship or one source of trauma. There’s always unresolved prior traumatic events, like sexual assault. This could have also contributed or caused the PTSD. Now, of course, since Susan had experienced this in the past as a young person, but did not tell the doctors about it, there was no way to know whether any PTSD she might have was related to Marvin or related to the past assault or some
combination of both. The diagnosis were based on incomplete information. See, the doctor had testified in a pre-trial hearing that hormonal changes during pregnancy can affect cognition, including planning, thinking, mental state, judgment, insight, perception, and memory. The judge felt that this testimony would essentially be suggesting to the jury Susan had diminished capacity at the time of the shooting because of her pregnancy hormones, which would not be appropriate defense under the law. So, then Susan’s
team argued that, well, if we don’t have this PTSD diagnosis, Susan would have no way to support her claims Marvin was abusing her. But, this wasn’t entirely accurate. She was still able to present other evidence of the alleged abuse at her trial. Her OBGYN testified Susan did report physical abuse from Marvin before the shooting.
Her family physician gave similar testimony, and also both of Marvin’s ex-wives testified that, yes, when we were married to him, he was abusive. Susan also called Dr. Robert Gaffner. He’s an expert witness to testify about the general characteristics and behavioral patterns of domestic violence victims. He didn’t specifically diagnose Susan, and he wasn’t vouching for her particular claims, but he did say that there are many cases where when a woman or people suffer domestic violence, they shut down, and they find it hard to speak about it to others. Hence, the lack of
witnesses in her family. So, the jury heard all the evidence that was allowed, including Susan’s own account of what happened. They heard Marvin allegedly kicked her in the stomach while she was pregnant. They heard that he was sick of her, and he didn’t want her, and he did not want the baby, and that she grabbed the gun believing it was a matter of survival.
They also heard about the two days that passed before Susan reported the shooting. And of course, her attempts to clean up the scene and wrapping Marvin’s body in a tub, disposing of the sheets, and burying the gun. The jury had to decide whether Susan had acted in self-defense, as she claimed, or whether she had committed murder.
And after hearing all the evidence, the jury found Susan guilty on all counts. She was convicted of first-degree murder for Marvin’s death and three counts of tampering with physical evidence for her attempts to clean up the scene. I think that’s what really did it for the jury, but I’ll come back to that at the end. The judge sentenced Susan to life in prison.
So, of course, Susan’s attorneys appealed the conviction, arguing that the judge had made a mistake not allowing the PTSD diagnosis and the pregnancy hormone testimony into evidence. They argued that this evidence was crucial to Susan’s defense, and that without it, she couldn’t adequately present her claim of self-defense.
The appeals court reviewed the case to determine whether the judge had abused his discretion in excluding this evidence. The appeals court looked at whether the PTSD diagnosis, based solely on Susan’s own statements without independent verification, should be admissible as proof that abuse actually happened. They considered cases from other states, including one from Oregon, where a court had ruled that an expert’s diagnosis based on a child’s statement about sexual abuse was inadmissible because it essentially vouched for the child’s
credibility. The appeals court found this reasoning persuasive and applicable to Susan’s case. The court also considered whether the PTSD diagnosis could be used to show that Susan had a character trait of impulsivity, which might suggest she acted reflexively rather than with premeditation. But the evidence didn’t really support this theory. Dr.
Rose had testified that people who are hyper-vigilant about perceived dangers as a result of PTSD don’t act out of impulsivity. Instead, they’re more likely to withdraw to protect themselves. Dr. Geffner’s testimony about domestic violence claims also did not indicate that they generally exhibit impulsivity. And without any evidence that PTSD came from domestic violence in her case, it wouldn’t help show Susan acted impulsively rather than with premeditation.
And as for the pregnancy hormone testimony, the appeals court agreed with the trial judge this would have been improper evidence of diminished capacity. When they spoke about the cortisol affecting cognition, planning, and perception, this would be telling the jury Susan couldn’t form the intent to commit murder because of her pregnancy hormones.
But this is not a recognized defense. They rejected this argument. They concluded that Susan, you had ample time to present substantial evidence. You could have gone to your physician and spoken more about your reported abuse, but you didn’t. They did take the ex-wives of Marvin into account and what they said, but ultimately, Susan’s appeal was rejected.
And she is to spend the rest of her life in prison. What do you think? Is that fair? I think if the ex-wives are saying, “Yes, Marvin was abusive.” And if she did report this to the physician and the OB/GYN, then it’s clear she was experiencing some kind of domestic abuse. But I think the problem for Susan was that one, she took 2 days to report it.
She put the body in the tub. She hid the gun. This shows shadiness, if you like. I think this worked against her. But I don’t doubt she was experiencing some kind of abuse. So, is her sentencing fair? Let me know. But she said, “Well, this isn’t going to work. Plan A did not work. Let’s try Plan B. Plan B, I’m a battered wife.
He He mentally abuses me. Uh He’s been tormenting me, won’t let me go. That’ll That’ll work. Let’s try that. Let’s come in 2 days later and say, “I was just distraught. You know, I’ve been abused so much that you know, I wrapped my dead husband up in tarps and trash bags and buried guns down in the woods and threw stuff in the trash across town.”
