Friends Ponder Motive in Killings

Naked and bleeding from a cut to her throat, a piece of duct tape around one wrist, Carolyn Marksberry uttered a name as she collapsed into a neighbor’s house after a man killed two of her children and wounded a third.

“She was saying the guy’s name--Marc Chapman,” the neighbor, Mike Schlachta, said Saturday, recalling how he was awakened early the previous morning as Marksberry rang his doorbell and collapsed inside.

Marco Chapman, a youth soccer coach last fall in this Ohio River town 45 miles southwest of Cincinnati, was arrested and jailed in West Virginia, where he was awaiting extradition. Police in Kentucky charged him with murder, assault and burglary in the attack that killed Chelbi Sharon, 7, and her 6-year-old brother, Cody.

Marksberry remained in critical condition Saturday at a Cincinnati hospital. A 10-year-old daughter who survived the attack, Courtney Sharon, was in fair condition.

Marksberry had gone to Schlachta’s home for help about 6 a.m. Friday. As she was being put into an ambulance, Schlachta began to go across the street to her house to check on her children when he learned from police that there had been a multiple homicide.

“I went down on the ground and started crying,” Schlachta said.

Marksberry’s husband, Charles, a steel-company employee, was in Spain for training at the time of the attack.

“I had told him, ‘I’ll keep an eye out on them,’ ” Schlachta said. “I didn’t do a very good job of that.”

Police have offered no motive for the attack, describing Chapman only as an acquaintance of Marksberry.

Friends and neighbors of Marksberry said Chapman had been dating one of her close friends. That woman had broken up with Chapman sometime before Friday’s attack, said Lisa Asher, another of Marksberry’s friends.

“I’ve heard that he was upset about the breakup and blamed it on Carolyn,” Asher said. “I assume he felt she was the reason they broke up.”

At the elementary school where Cody was a first-grader and Chelbi a third-grader, snapshots of the two with classmates were pasted to the wall above two small tables covered with white paper. Written in black ink at Cody’s table, one message read, “You’re sweet smile will always shine down on us.”