A memorial sign hung for Suzanne Seemann near the site of her death in 2012. Photo by Andrew Goff.

Warning: This story includes graphic descriptions of violence, including two murders.

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In the early morning hours of Sept. 27, 2012, Jason Anthony Warren used a sword to mercilessly murder a 47-year-old Hoopa woman named Dorothy Ulrich, then drove more than 60 miles before intentionally running down three women and a dog on an early morning jog, killing 40-year-old Suzanne Seemann (and the dog) and seriously injuring her friends Terri Vroman Little and Jessica Hunt.

That was the argument made in great detail this morning as prosecutor Paul Sequeira delivered his opening statements in the double-murder case against Warren. Sequeira’s 40-minute presentation offered an overview of the prosecution’s promised evidence from two different perspectives — first from that of law enforcement officers collecting the gruesome evidence of that morning, and then backtracking for a chronological perspective, tracking Warren from a trailer in Hoopa to a friend’s house in Eureka, with a trail of carnage left in his wake.

Several friends and family members of Warren’s alleged victims had to get up and leave the courtroom partway through his opening remarks as Sequeira played an audio track allegedly recorded by a security system outside Ulrich’s trailer. On the recording, which Sequeira said was captured shortly before 4:30 a.m. the day of the murders, a woman can be heard crying out in pain and begging her attacker to stop as percussive sounds — like whacks or perhaps stabbings — repeat again and again and again.

It was the first but not the only time today that people would leave the courtroom, overwhelmed by the evidence being presented.

Warren

The proceedings began with Judge Timothy Cissna reading the charges to the jury of seven men and five women. Specifically Warren is charged with two counts of murder — those of Ulrich and Seemann — with the special allegations of lying in wait and torture pertaining to the Ulrich murder. He’s also charged with two counts of attempted murder for allegedly running down Vroman Little and Hunt. The latter charges — also felonies — include the allegation that the attempted murders were “willful, deliberate, and premeditated.”

Warren, who sat quietly throughout the day in a dark gray dress shirt, has entered a plea of “not guilty” to all charges.

Warren’s defense attorney, Glenn Brown, elected to postpone his opening statements. Judge Cissna said Brown can opt to deliver those statements at the beginning of the defense’s own case, rather than at the outset of the trial.

Sequeira launched into his statements by introducing Ulrich and Seemann, both wives and moms living in Humboldt County, though they had never met. But early on the morning of Sept. 27, 2012, Sequeira said, “they would be horribly and tragically connected in death.”

Seeman and her friends were “serious runners” who would get together three times a week for pre-dawn jogs, meeting at various different places around the county. On this particular morning they met at Three Corners Market on Myrtle Ave. (Most folks just call the whole stretch between Eureka and Arcata “Old Arcata Road,” though technically it’s still Myrtle Ave. until you hit Indianola Road.)

The women wore reflective clothing and headlamps, and they followed proper safety precautions by running along the shoulder toward oncoming traffic, going into single file when cars approached from ahead, Sequeira explained. Vroman Little was wearing a high-tech watch that tracked the runners’ pace, distance, elevation gains and more.

The trio was running north toward Arcata when, at about 5:38 a.m., they were “run down from behind by a car,” Sequeira said.

A Eureka postal worker named Lalanya Beck was driving to work from her home just south of the Indianola cutoff when she became the first person to come across the carnage. Beck was one of a string of witnesses Sequeira called today, and she testified to seeing a pair of headlights pointed perpendicular to the road, into a field to the east of Myrtle Ave. 

The vehicle executed a three-point turn and headed south toward Eureka, though it drove for quite a stretch in the left-hand lane before returning to the proper lane. Beck followed, also using the oncoming-traffic lane to avoid what she thought was debris in the roadway. Only after she’d passed did she realize that it was a person, she testified. She stopped, turned her car around and returned to the scene.

Sequeira described that scene in his opening remarks, saying there were bodies, shoes, glass, headlight pieces and other shards of car strewn in a northbound trajectory on the southbound shoulder. Beck called 911.

The next person to the scene, coincidentally, was an Arcata police officer on his way to work from his home in Cutten. He found Beck on the phone with a 911 dispatcher and found Hunt in the road, “moaning,” Sequeira said. The officer found Vroman Little nearby “screaming, off in a ditch, dealing with her own catastrophic injuries,” he continued. And finally he found the body of Seemann. He checked for a pulse or signs of breathing before concluding that she was dead.

“You will see Suzanne Seemann’s shoe almost 80 feet away in a field,” Sequeira told the jury. “In a ditch, Maggie. The dog. Also dead.”

Among the field of debris and bodies on the roadway, Sequeira said, there was one thing responding law enforcement officers didn’t find: skid marks. “None,” he said. It was clear they were hit from behind, while running on the opposite shoulder. “No skid marks,” Sequeira repeated. “Not one.”

He then proceeded to tell the jury how law enforcement was notified of a heavily damaged Kia sedan parked in the parking lot of the Adult Day Health Services building off Eureka’s California Street and traced that car back to Dorothy Ulrich in Hoopa. Officers from the California Highway Patrol and Hoopa Tribal Police responded to Ulrich’s trailer, where eventually friends gain access and make what Sequeira called “a grisly discovery: Ulrich face-down in a pool of blood.” The investigating officer could see “brain matter,” he said.

A lanyard with a decorative metal piece was found near the body, Sequeira said. It matched a lanyard and decorative piece attached to a samurai sword found elsewhere in the trailer. “The murder weapon has not been found,” the prosecutor said, “but you will see its twin.”

Ulrich was found with four “deep, penetrating wounds,” including one that penetrated her heart, as well as defensive wounds to her shoulders and arms and “chopping injuries to her head,” Sequeira said, adding that there was some evidence of strangulation.

Now there are two murder scenes. “What’s the connection?” Sequeira asked. He then pointed at Warren. “It’s the defendant.”

Warren, he argued, had met Ulrich at a nearby mini-mart and spent most of the previous day with her, ostensibly helping her to pack up her trailer in preparation for a move. But on Sept. 27, at 4:30 a.m., security cameras outside Ulrich’s trailer caught Warren leaving with “what looks like a sword,” the attorney said. He then prepared the jury for the audio from that footage: “You will hear Dorothy Ulrich dying, begging for life with her last words.”

Before the audio began, several people in the courtroom got up and filed out. The audio track started. There was a long section of fuzzy silence before a woman’s voice could be heard.

“Ow! Ow! What are you doing? Stop! Please stop!”

The woman’s cries were mixed with indistinct percussive sounds.

“Stop! You’re hurting me! Aagh!”

The woman kept repeating her cries. “Please stop! Please.” As the recording went on, her voice started to lose some of its urgency. The jury could hear the life draining out of her.

“Stop.”

Whack. 

“Please stop.”

Whack whack.

“Please. I can’t do this.”

Whack.

“Aaah. I can’t do this.”

A gruff man’s voice came in. “Be quiet,” is what it sounded like.

And still, the whacking sounds continued.

“Please,” the woman’s voice said. “I can’t do this anymore.”

The recording finally ended, and the courtroom sat in stunned silence. Sequeira resumed his argument. “Dorothy Ulrich’s dying words were, ‘Please stop; I can’t do this anymore,’” he said.

Warren was soon found at the Sonoma Ave. residence of a friend in Eureka. Sequeira wrapped up his opening remarks by outlining the forensic evidence that will be presented: The Kia sedan had hairs in the bumper similar to Maggie the dog’s. A mirror found at the scene of the collision with joggers fits perfectly into the housing for the missing side-view mirror from that Kia. A triangle-shaped piece of chrome-painted plastic found at the same scene fits perfectly — “like a puzzle,” a CHP officer later testified — into the grille of the Kia. Blood found on the car’s right door window matches Hunt’s DNA. Other blood samples pulled from the car match Seemann’s and Vroman Little’s DNA.

Warren’s clothing was gathered as evidence, Sequeira explained, and fibers pulled from the driver’s side of the car match that jacket. In Warren’s shoes and pockets and socks, shards of glass were found consistent with shattered windshield glass. “What a shock,” Sequeira said sarcastically.

Blood on Warren’s left shoe, his shorts and the doormat of the Kia come back as a matches to Ulrich’s DNA.

With that storyline complete, Sequeira then backed up and ran through the events again in chronological order. He said Warren spent Sept. 26 with Ulrich, helping her to pack up, before “at 4:30 a.m. he decides to brutally murder her. He steals her car and flees.” He then takes Old Arcata Road toward Eureka and spots three joggers, passing them, Sequeira said before he “turns around and runs them down.”

Sequeira wrapped up with this:

“The video ID’s him as the killer. The audio ID’s him as the killer. The fiber ID’s him as the killer. The glass ID’s him as the killer. And certainly the DNA ID’s him as the killer.” Sequeira then told the jury that they will come to the conclusion that Warren is guilty of the two murders, plus the charges of lying in wait and torture.

For the remainder of the day, Sequeira called witnesses to begin to fill in this storyline he’d laid out. First among them were Jessica Hunt and Terri Vroman Little, the joggers who were run down along with Seemann. Hunt was tearful as she recalled her regular running routine with her friends. Her memory of the morning in question has been almost entirely erased, she said, though she remembers the preparations they women made before setting out for their jog.

Maggie was Hunt’s dog, “a beautiful mutt,” she said.

Asked to recount her injuries, Hunt said she suffered a traumatic brain injury, a broken scapula, a compound fracture of her tibia and fibula, broken bones in her right foot, a collapsed lung, an adrenal hematoma and lacerations on her scalp and body that required staples and stitches. She spent 11 days in the hospital and seven days in rehab.

Vroman Little also recalled the women’s morning routine before setting out for their jog on Sept. 27, 2012. She’d worn a Garmin brand GPS watch to track their progress, but like Hunt, she doesn’t remember much from that morning. Asked what is the first thing she remembers after that morning, Vroman Little began to cry.

Her next memory, she said, was lying in the emergency room and someone trying to take her wedding rings off her fingers. “My leg was badly broken and it hurt a lot,” she said. Her husband was at her side and explained that the doctors needed to remove the rings in order to help her. 

She was in the hospital for a week and rehab for another week. She, too, described her injuries: Traumatic brain injury from small bleeds in the brain, damage to her third cranial optic nerve, a broken rib, a lung bruise, cuts to her face, a hematoma on her elbow, a broken foot and broken tibia and fibula on her left leg that required pins and a rod to repair.

Both women were asked to identify various pieces of evidence, including their running shoes, socks and gear such as headlamps and reflective clothing that were recovered from the site of the collision.

Sequeira called several more witnesses throughout the day, including postal worker Lalanya Beck and law enforcement officers from the Arcata Police Department and the California Highway Patrol. He brought out maps and diagrams of the scene on Myrtle Ave. and asked the witnesses to recount the events of that morning as they experienced them. 

Another emotional jolt came late in the afternoon when Sequeira showed the jury photos from the day of the incidents, including several shots of the dead dog and the crumpled, battered body of Suzanne Seemann.

In his cross examinations, Brown asked each witness to clarify certain details of their testimony. With the questioning of Beck he asked her to draw a diagram of the scene she’d describe using a felt tip pen on a large easel. And he occasionally objected to questions from Sequeira, saying they were leading or unfounded. Judge Cissna sustained those objections more often than not.

The trial is scheduled to continue Wednesday morning at 8:30 a.m.

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