Perry police officer on scene of Sabrina Ray's death: 'It was a house of horrors and evil'

DANIEL P. FINNEY   | The Des Moines Register

The nightmare began as an unremarkable 911 call about an unresponsive 16-year-old girl at a house on First Street in Perry.

Officers Josh Sienkiewicz and Taylor Rittman responded, arriving at the same time. Sienkiewicz paused to grab his defibrillator from the trunk of his patrol car. Rittman went into the house.

The time was about 4:30 p.m. The date was May 12, 2017.

Sienkiewicz entered the house. He asked a woman where Rittman was. She pointed toward the northeast corner of the house.

Sienkiewicz soon joined Rittman in the doorway of a room.

The two Perry officers were looking at the emaciated dead body of Sabrina Lynn Ray, a 16-year-old girl who prosecutors say was beaten, starved and otherwise abused by her adoptive family until she died.

“It was at this point that I saw the most horrific scene in my entire career and life,” Sienkiewicz wrote in a police report briefly unsealed this month before Marc Ray, her adoptive father, pleaded guilty of kidnapping and other charges. “It is hard to put into words the feelings that come over me — the smells, the pain, the anguish, the fear and the evil.”

Let me pause for a moment to explain just how unusual it is for a police officer to express such raw emotion in a report.

I’ve been reading police reports since 1996. Most of them read like legal briefs. Some give more descriptive narratives than others, but few reports offer this much insight to the impact of what officers see on their own emotions.

And what they saw that May day challenged even a seasoned officer such as Sienkiewicz, who besides being a police officer has also worked as a firefighter and EMT for a decade.

Sienkiewicz could tell Sabrina was dead and Rittman confirmed it by checking Sabrina’s frail remains for a pulse.

Sienkiewicz didn’t enter the room, in an effort to preserve the crime scene, but he saw more than any of us would ever want to.

“Sabrina was lying on her left side wearing only a diaper and what appeared to be a white tank top,” he wrote.

A state medical examiner would later identify the stains on Sabrina’s shirt as her own stool. 

“Sabrina’s skin tone was very ashen and white,” Sienkiewicz wrote. Her “eyes and mouth were still open and her bones were so apparent due to being so skinny.”

The medical examiner’s report listed Sabrina’s weight at 56 pounds. She was slightly over 4-foot-5, putting her body weight and size both below the 5th percentile for her age. A 16-year-old girl at the 50th percentile weighs about 118 pounds and is 5-foot-4.

Sabrina was beaten and starved to death and her body nearly withered out of existence.

“I was also drawn to a large bruise on her chin area,” Sienkiewicz wrote.

Investigators later revealed Sabrina had been drop-kicked down stairs by her adoptive family.

“All this was seen from the doorway area as the emotions I was feeling … froze where I was standing,” Sienkiewicz wrote.

The officer turned his attention to the other children in the house. The girls looked at the officer and each other but said nothing.

“There were no tears,” Sienkiewicz wrote. “There were no screams of sadness. (The younger girls) were frozen in place and I was immediately fearful for them. (They) had an indescribable stare and facial expression on their faces. I sensed such evil around us. I wanted to get (the children) away from there and wanted to keep them safe however I could.”

Sienkiewicz sent the three surviving girls to the front of the house.

“I refuse to refer to this as a ‘home,’” he wrote. “This was not a home — it was a house of horrors and evil.”

The true nature of those horrors were revealed in trials last year and will likely be revisited when her adoptive father, Marc Ray, is sentenced in January. He pleaded guilty to three counts of kidnapping — one for each of the girls in his care — and illegal confinement.

I’ll not belabor them further in these paragraphs. Instead, I ask you to revisit the words of Sienkiewicz.

The horror he and other first responders, detectives and investigators witnessed that day is awful, but such horrific visions are commonplace for law enforcement, medics and others whom we ask to keep us safe.

I think of a friend of mine, a Des Moines police sergeant, every Thanksgiving when it’s time for pie. My friend skips the pie on Thanksgiving because of his recollections from a suicide he covered on the south side many years ago.

The late Dan Dusenbery, a former Des Moines police officer, wrote in his unpublished memoirs of having to sustain his self-control at the scene of severely abused child. Dusenbery wrote of wanting to use his nightstick to revisit the horrors on the person responsible — the boy’s father.

Dusenbery never did. Most cops never do. Sienkiewicz and Rittman didn’t in Perry on the terrible day they found Sabrina.

I wonder how they do it, how they process all that horror, how they look at the base human savagery and still manage the crime scene, get things organized and ensure justice prevails.

Because Sienkiewicz and Rittman handled the crime scene properly, detectives and prosecutors built cases that sent Sabrina’s brother to prison on a 10-year sentence and her grandmother for 20. Her father faces decades in prison.

Her mother is scheduled to face trial in Woodbury County this February.

Dusenbery once reminded me of the cost for our men and women in uniform. Dusenbery spent his whole career on patrol, a rarity. He was jovial, one of the Des Moines police’s greatest characters.

But in a rare, unguarded moment, Dusenbery once told me: “I have seen things nobody should ever see. I have seen things I can’t forget.”

Those words surely applied to Perry first responders that terrible day in May 2017.

Remember them in your thoughts and prayers whenever you hear sirens in the distance.

Columnist Daniel P. Finney grew up in Winterset and east Des Moines. He can be reached at dafinney@dmreg.com or 515-284-8144.