The Bad Samaritan

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He was just an innocent bystander, he says. A bystander who peered over the top of a toilet stall and discovered--in the women's rest room of a casino on the California-Nevada border--his best friend Jeremy Strohmeyer, 18, struggling with a seven-year-old girl. He tapped his friend's head, he says, knocking off his hat, but couldn't get him to stop. So David Cash Jr. decided to take a walk.

The scene in front of him could not have been any clearer: a nearly 6-ft.-tall teenager and a little girl who didn't yet weigh 50 lbs. locked in the stall of the Primadonna Resort casino at 3:47 in the morning. And yet Cash goes for a walk. He says nothing to the security guards. Less than half an hour later, Strohmeyer emerges and tells Cash he has molested and murdered the child. Cash, stunned, does not ask why. According to grand jury testimony obtained by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, Cash does venture one question: Had the little girl been aroused? By the time Sherrice Iverson's broken body is found at 5 a.m., stuffed in a toilet bowl, the two teenagers are already on their way to Las Vegas.

Flash forward 15 months. This week Strohmeyer goes on trial in Las Vegas for the murder, kidnapping and sexual assault of Sherrice Iverson. If convicted, he faces a possible death sentence, but his lawyer, Leslie Abramson, claims his confession was extracted by police while he was drugged. His friend Cash, now 19 and an aspiring nuclear engineer in his sophomore year at Berkeley, is not charged with anything, but he faces a trial of another kind, from angry Californians. The tale of the bad Samaritan has touched a nerve.

They are angry that he told the Los Angeles Times he was not going "to lose sleep over somebody else's problems." Angry that he felt more sorry for Jeremy than for Sherrice because, after all, he had lost his best friend, and he did not know the girl or her family. Angry that he told the Times his notoriety had helped invigorate his social life--a comment he has since denied. And angry simply because he did nothing before or after the carnage. "What have I done?" he defiantly asked radio disk jockey Tim Conway Jr. one night during an impromptu call-in to Los Angeles station KLSX. "I have done nothing wrong." Even the police have told him so, Cash said. "You s.o.b.!" screamed Conway in return. "I hope you burn in hell!"

Technically, Cash is right. In Nevada, California and in fact most of the U.S., doing nothing about a crime is no crime at all. Only a handful of states--including Vermont, Wisconsin and Minnesota--have "duty to assist" laws requiring those who witness a crime to offer aid and report it. Cash's callousness, though, has sparked a movement in both California and Nevada to pass something called "Sherrice's law" to require witnesses to intervene and report cases of sexual assault against children. If necessary, says Najee Ali, spokesman for Sherrice's mother Yolanda Manuel, advocates of the proposed law will go to the federal level to win passage.