June 9, 2021 in the Indianapolis Star
Grainy surveillance footage from a frigid February afternoon shows a man dragging an unconscious woman out of the passenger seat of a black sedan and into a snow bank behind an east side laundromat.
The man throws what appears to be the woman’s belongings next her body before driving off. Workers at the laundromat in the 9900 block of East 38th Street would find 50-year-old Shanel Smith dead in the same spot more than eight hours later.
It’s that video, obtained by IndyStar, that led the Marion County Coroner’s Office to rule Smith’s death a homicide, according to Deputy Coroner Alfarena McGinty.
Smith was alive when she was seen being dragged out of the vehicle, McGinty indicated. An autopsy conducted Feb. 19 — the day she was found — determined Smith died of “environmental cold exposure.” Temperatures on the east side were around 15 degrees that night, according to the National Weather Service, and it had snowed earlier in the day.
It remains unclear what caused Smith to appear lifeless in the video. Footage from moments before Smith was dragged from the car shows the sedan parked between the laundromat and a liquor store for approximately 10 minutes.
After the car parks, the passenger door opens and quickly closes. Minutes later, someone walks up to the driver’s side window of the car, talks to the driver and walks off. Four other people do the same thing before the driver — a man wearing a white baseball hat and cream-colored jacket — briefly gets out of the car and into the backseat of a nearby vehicle.
The video does not show who opened the passenger door, and the poor quality and angle of the camera makes it difficult to see whether someone is moving in the front passenger seat during that time.
But McGinty said what happened before the woman was left in the snow did not influence her decision — it was the act of leaving an unconscious person outside in the cold where she would later die that prompted the homicide ruling.
“We determined that had it not been for someone leaving her out in the elements, would she have survived? Possibly,” McGinty said. “That’s why we call it a homicide — because it was a person intentionally being left out in the elements, in the snow.”
“Cold exposure is what caused the death,” she added. “But that was contributed by someone else.”
The homicide ruling
There were “no obvious signs of trauma” to Smith’s body when she was found, according to an Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department report and the coroner’s office.
Police were given a copy of the surveillance video the day Smith was found but had labeled the case a “death investigation” until last week, when IMPD announced the death was being investigated as a homicide.
Though the autopsy was conducted hours after the incident, McGinty noted toxicology reports and other tests take 8 to 12 weeks for results. She said her office has been dealing with a “pretty heavy” caseload this year, adding that, in complicated cases like this one, coroner’s office staff meets to discuss findings before giving their rulings.
The coroner’s office also often works with IMPD during the process, asking police for evidence or information that may put findings in a different light. In Smith’s case, the surveillance video was central.
“It definitely helped us to kind of better understand the circumstances surrounding the death,” McGinty said of the footage.
The coroner’s office gave police its homicide ruling April 30, after it had viewed the video.
Few details
The announcements from the coroner and IMPD give little insight into what happened to Smith in the moments before she is seen being pulled from the sedan.
IMPD declined IndyStar’s request to comment on the case or “share what information the detectives have or don’t have,” citing the ongoing investigation. The autopsy report is only available to next-of-kin, according to the coroner.
And that lack of information has left Smith’s family with questions.
Smith grew up in the Indianapolis area and graduated from Lawrence North High School, according to relatives. After attending Marian University, she worked as a nurse in both Bloomington and Indianapolis. She had two children, ages 12 and 10.
“The only thing it said on the death certificate was homicide,” John Wallace, the father of Smith’s two young children, told IndyStar. “(It) gave us no clue how she died.”
“That’s all it said on there,” he added. “So we are still left with questions.”
The answers to those questions — including what led up to Smith becoming unconscious — may prove important when it comes to potential future charging decisions, should someone be arrested in the case, according to legal experts.
Fran Watson, a professor at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law, noted there are different levels of culpability based on a prosecutor’s ability to prove criminal intent in a homicide case.
Based on investigators’ findings, charges could range from murder to voluntary manslaughter to reckless homicide, she said.
“It sounds minimally to be reckless homicide,” Watson said. “How they came to be in that car and their behaviors would impact whether or not (the prosecutors) would go for and then succeed in obtaining a conviction for the greater (charge).”
Novella Nedeff, another IU law professor who specializes in criminal law, largely echoed those thoughts. Nedeff noted the unanswered questions in the investigation but said the act of knowingly leaving someone unconscious in the cold makes a “decent case” for a lower-level homicide.
“If you drop off an unconscious person someplace where they’re not likely to be found for a while and it’s cold, you should know that they’re likely to die,” Nedeff said. “That seems pretty risky and a substantial deviation from acceptable standards of conduct.”
No arrests have been made in the incident.
Lawrence Andrea 