By DAVE SCHEIBER

© St. Petersburg Times, published December 17, 2000

Tragedy chose Kimber's Grandma for a mission, to tell anyone who will listen what she knows: Just an instant of frustration can shatter everything.

LARGO -- In a quiet stretch of mobile homes called Leisure World, Janet Goree's cozy front room looks like a page from a children's Christmas book.

Only days into December, the 43-year-old grandmother has already stacked a small mountain of presents beneath a festive tree, topped by the figure of an angel.

Stuffed dolls of the season are propped into position: bears in winter scarves, cheerful reindeer, little electronic Santas lining a stairway. Holiday incense burns next to a wall covered with family photos.

It is just past 3 p.m. Goree's adult daughter, Nicole, who lives nearby, has stopped in with her two children. One of them, 9-year-old Kayla, is entranced by the piles of gifts.

"I wish I could open them right now," she says.

Janet Goree holds a photograph of her granddaughters. Kayla, left, who was 5 when Kimber died, still suffers the loss. A therapist says she has post-traumatic stress disorder, and her mother says she has nightmares.

It is not Kayla's biggest wish, though. She would like to remember more, to know more, about another little girl, the one whose name is tattooed beside an image of an angel on her mother's wrist.

Across the room stands a framed snapshot of Kayla's sister, Kimber, lying on a cushion inside a red Radio Flyer wagon, a faint smile on her lips.

Kimber has missed four Christmases now. Every Christmas morning, Janet Goree and her family light a candle, say a prayer and cry for a baby girl who lost her life because of her own tears.

'Why did you shake me?'

The full picture of what happened remains hazy.

On May 5, 1993, Nicole was working a late shift at a convenience store in Chesapeake, Va. Her husband, Chris West, stayed home to watch their two daughters: Kayla, 2 1/2, and Kimber, short for Kimberlin, 8 weeks old.

Nicole had taken Kimber to the doctor to get her shots, and now Kimber was crying and fussing. Nicole and her mother believe, and experts concluded, that her father lost his temper and shook his infant daughter violently.

The doctor later told them that the shaking was equivalent to the G-forces of a jet taking off. West pleaded guilty to a criminal charge but later insisted that he did not use excessive force or do anything that could have badly injured the baby.

Kimber was never the same. She lost her vision and the use of 67 percent of her brain. Nearly three years later, she died from complications medically diagnosed as shaken baby syndrome.

Her grandmother, Janet Goree, would never be the same, either. She got counseling for her own grief, coaxed Nicole into therapy and back from a deep depression.

Then she started talking to anyone who would listen -- young couples, prisoners, juvenile detainees, civic groups, family support organizations, law enforcement people, medical workers -- about the dangers of shaking babies. She made medical contacts, earned state grants and drummed up funds to help her spread the message and offset her mounting phone bills and travel expenses.

Today, Goree speaks to as many as 35 groups a month around Florida. She is on the board of the national Shaken Baby Alliance and is organizing the first candlelight vigil for shaken baby syndrome on April 28 in Washington, on the National Mall.

She calls her work "The Kimber Campaign," and her homemade stationery bears the words: "I TRUSTED you with my life, I CRIED because I NEEDED you, WHY DID YOU SHAKE ME?" She signs every correspondence "Janet Goree, Kimber's Grandma."

Simple messages

Goree prepares for her presentations by poking a hole in an egg with a sewing needle and injecting red food coloring with a syringe.

When she gets in front of an audience, she shakes a baby doll to show how quickly fatal damage can be done. Then she produces a glass jar holding the doctored egg and shakes it hard.

"It breaks and everyone sees the red, which looks like blood," she says. "And I say, " 'See, this is what happened to the baby's brain when I shook it.' "

The reality is not far removed from Goree's graphic demonstration. When an infant is shaken, the brain slams against the skull. The motion snaps the fragile veins connecting the two, which leads to bleeding and a shortage of oxygen to the brain.

In 1995-96, shaken baby syndrome was the leading cause of death by abuse in Florida. As many as 1,200 babies across the nation arrive at hospital emergency rooms each year displaying symptoms of the syndrome, often including hemorrhaging of the retinas.

"What people may not know is that for every child that dies from being shaken, two survive," she says. "Kimber's medical costs exceeded $1-million, and Medicaid picked it up. So beyond the tragedy of losing a precious child, think about what this is costing us as taxpayers to take care of the children who survive."

Goree's messages are simple: Incidents of shaken baby syndrome cross all social and economic boundaries, and the perpetrators often have no history of abusing children. Someone can seriously hurt or kill a baby in an instant of frustration.

"The thing to do is just put the baby in a safe place, walk away and cool off," she says.

Goree's contributions have not gone unnoticed.

"I think Janet has just been a phenom, an inspirational force," says Jaycy Showers, head of the national support group SBS Prevention Plus in Richmond, Va. "What's so tragic is that Janet didn't choose this mission. Tragedy chose her. It's taken all her heart and soul to do what she has done, and she deserves all the accolades in the world."

On this December day, though, Goree and Nicole are deeply worried. For the first time in her life, Kayla will not be with her family on Christmas Day. As part of a custody arrangement, Kayla is flying to North Carolina for eight days.

She will spend Christmas with the man convicted of shaking her younger sister.

A light flickers out

On a May morning in 1993, Janet Goree was in a meeting at her new job with Auto Trader magazine in Clearwater when she received an emergency call. It was Nicole, calling frantically from Virginia. Kimber was in a coma and wasn't expected to live.

"Chris was saying he hadn't done anything, that maybe Kayla dropped her," Goree recalls. "But I'm thinking that doesn't sound right. Then she says, " 'The doctors think Chris did it, and that it's shaken baby syndrome.' "

Goree had heard the term only in passing. Now the sound of it left her dazed.

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She raced to Tampa International and caught the first flight to Charlotte, bound for Chesapeake. She walked into Kimber's hospital room, where the tiny infant lay motionless, connected to a swirl of tubes, and her heart broke.

"I saw her lying there and she looked dead, and I was thinking, " 'How could this have happened? Chris could not do this,' " she says. Then the doctor took her aside and repeated what he had told Nicole: It had to be Chris. For hours, Goree was forced to share a cramped waiting room with her son-in-law, seething in silence as he maintained his innocence.

West later acknowledged using "inappropriate force in trying to quiet and calm the child," according to court records.

He has since denied doing even that. He says he woke from a nap to find Kimber purple in the face. He patted her back, blew in her face and shook her lightly to awaken her. He says she started breathing again and he laid her down beside him, then dozed off again.

"I know the biggest mistake of the whole thing is I didn't call 911," he says. "I just kind of waited for Nicole to get home. . . . Kimberlin was breathing fine again. I thought she was, but she really wasn't. But she got her color back and she looked like she was fine."

He continues, "When I picked her up and patted her on the back, and moved around with her, I don't know if I did it too violently or harshly because I was in a panic. I just don't know how what I did could have done the damage they say I did. I'm not worried about it because I know what happened. "Nothing is going to change what has happened," he adds. "I know I'm going to heaven and see my daughter one day. I've got my peace of mind."

After the guilty plea, West was ordered "not to reside in or come within sight of the family home." But he received leniency: a one-year probationary period, extended to five years after he failed subsequent drug tests.

Goree is still furious that he did not go to jail. "He walked into the jail with his attorney, was processed and fingerprinted, and then he walked out."

In the aftermath, Nicole divorced West. He remarried, moved to a small North Carolina city just south of Virginia and had three children with his new wife. Nicole brought Kayla and Kimber to Florida, moving next door to Janet and Jack Goree in Leisure World.

Despite her terribly impaired condition, Kimber still brought considerable joy into her family's life. She smiled when her grandmother bounced her on her lap or when her grandfather gave her rides in the Radio Flyer wagon. She jingled the little bells on her socks when she heard the voices of her mother and other family members.

After three years, Kimber's damaged system had deteriorated so much that she was placed in a Pinellas County hospice center. Nicole and Kayla often climbed under the covers to cuddle with her. On Feb. 10, 1996, the family was summoned to the center, where they gathered with hospice workers around Kimber's bed. Nicole was crying outside the room when a nurse pronounced Kimber dead in Goree's arms.

Goree went out to console her daughter. They returned to the room to find that Kimber had started breathing again. "Nicole held her and told her goodbye," Goree says. "It was almost like Kimber was waiting for her mom to say it's okay." Moments later, she died.

West attended the large funeral, even though Goree and her daughter had asked him not to come. When the service ended, Nicole confronted him and started flailing at him with her fists.

"She was screaming, " 'You killed my child! You killed my child!' " Goree says.

Sobbing, Nicole apologized to her mother for lashing out. Goree told her, "Honey, there's not one person here that didn't want to do the same thing."

Shadows of abuse

Abuse has haunted Goree all her life.

"My older sister's dad was gone before I was born, and my dad left when I was 6 weeks old, so I never knew him," she says. "My younger brother's father was physically abusive to my mom, and both my sister and me. It was very hard. But I'm a firm believer in 'That which does not kill us makes us stronger.' "

Her mother divorced the abusive husband and married for a fourth time. The new husband moved the family to New Orleans when Goree was 13. He loved the kids. For the first time, Goree felt she had a real father and a sense of stability.

She married at 17, giving birth that year to a daughter, Nicole. Three years later, her son Bobby was born. The marriage, however, was falling apart. Her husband, she says, was a good man but became abusive when he drank, and she divorced him in 1978.

Goree, following her mother's pattern, married a second time, but the union fizzled quickly. Then, in 1989, her life finally began to change. Nicole and Bobby conspired to set her up with the divorced father of one of their high school pals. At 46, Jack Goree was 14 years older, but she sensed something special. "He told me he loved me two days after we met. And I felt the same way," she says. They were married two years later.

Goree's daughter was also in love. At 15, she fell for Chris West, a baseball and wrestling standout. She became pregnant and had a baby girl, Kayla. Several weeks later, at 16, Nicole married West.

There were early signs of problems. On Kayla's first birthday, Goree says, West lost his temper at the party and berated guests. "Nicole tried to calm him down, and he head-butted her and damaged her iris."

West says he has a vague recollection of an incident but says Nicole pushed him. The couple separated, as West underwent counseling for his anger, then reconciled. Nicole became pregnant, and Kimberlin Elaina West was born March 11, 1993. The family settled in Virginia, where West worked in construction.

Janet and Jack Goree, a retired naval shipyard mechanic, pinned their future on Florida. They moved to Leisure World and earned their trucking licenses with the dream of seeing the world side by side from the front seat of an 18-wheeler. Then came the panicked phone call from Nicole in Virginia that changed everything.

Kayla's world

Nicole sits in a pink rocker on her mother's front porch as Kayla and stepbrother Louie play nearby.

Now 26 and happily remarried, she works for Healthy Start as a family support specialist, helping educate parents charged with abusing their children.

Kayla is always on her mind. She worries about the nightmares her daughter has endured this year. She says Kayla has been diagnosed by a therapist as having post-traumatic stress disorder and may one day feel guilty for having survived when her sister did not.

A chatty, pretty fourth-grader, Kayla sleeps with Kimber's blanket and has hung up her sister's Christmas stocking in her bedroom. If her mother tells somebody in passing that she has two children, Kayla will jump in and say, "Don't forget about Kimber."

Last year, Kayla taped a 30-second public service TV commercial about shaken baby syndrome. In the spot, which has yet to air, Kayla wonders aloud about her sister and lays a flower on her gravestone.

Nicole Llana reads to her children, Kayla West, 9, and Louie Llana, 3. She divorced Kayla's father in the aftermath of Kimber's shaking. Though he pleaded guilty to a criminal charge, Chris West now insists that he did not use excessive force with the baby.

"I think about her a lot," Kayla says, joining her mother by the rocker. "I think about what she looks like and how she feels. I don't really remember her too well, except by pictures."

There is another big reminder of Kimber in Kayla's life: her father.

Chris West, 29, initially sought custody of Kayla while Nicole battled depression over her severely injured baby. A judge ruled that he could have Kayla every other Christmas Day, among other times. She has visited him many times, but he has never exercised the Christmas Day rights.

This year, though, he wants to spend Christmas with her. West's mother helped arrange the visit and Kayla will stay at her house during the trip, not West's. Both Nicole and Goree say they like and trust his mother, which helps ease their anxiety.

West, a furniture installer, lives nearby. He is separated from his second wife and was arrested on misdemeanor assault charges two weeks ago, accused of slapping her. But he says things are getting better.

"Money is tight, and we didn't want to be arguing in front of the kids, so that's why I'm staying apart right now," he says.

Kayla says she loves her father and wants to see him. She also knows that he did something very bad. Two summers ago, she asked him if he killed her sister.

"He told me he did, but it was an accident," she says. "He didn't mean to do it."

"I told her it was a terrible thing that happened, and that we know and pray Kimber is up in heaven with God, and one day we'll see her there," he says.

Last summer, Kayla says, her father became angry when she told him about the commercial.

"I was upset, I wasn't angry," he says. "I was upset it might mess up her head.

"She's not even 10 years old, and she shouldn't have to worry about things like this. She should be able to have her childhood and a beautiful Christmas and presents, and not have to worry about traveling 900 miles to see her dad. It's a hard thing to do, and she's in the middle of it."

Meanwhile, Janet and Jack Goree are bracing for an especially hard Christmas morning. They plan to take the family to Universal Studios' Islands of Adventure in Orlando, trying to keep sad thoughts at bay until Kayla returns home.

No backing down

Janet Goree sits at a desk inside the office in her house. The walls are covered with certificates of appreciation for her work promoting awareness of shaken baby syndrome. She has a glowing letter from the late Florida governor Lawton Chiles, and hand-stitched lyrics from a Tom Petty song: "Well, I won't back down, no I won't back down, you can stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won't back down."

Goree gets little rest, traveling from one speaking engagement to the next, rarely turning any down. "I was driving to Daytona yesterday, and I just wasn't in the mood to tell Kimber's story," she says. "But I wound up talking to 70 kids in a drug treatment program, most of them like 18 years old, and I know I got through to them."

Goree will soon have help in her mission. The Family Source, part of the Florida Department of Health, has allotted money for her to train 25 volunteers to conduct seminars about shaken baby syndrome.

Her big challenges for now are trying to draw national attention to the issue, de-stigmatize it and increase funding. "There's just not much money there, and part of it is because people are very judgmental about shaken baby situations," she says. "I used to get so angry to see how people treated Nicole, like it must have been her fault because her husband did it."

Her hope is that the national vigil in April will increase understanding of the syndrome. She has been working the phones and the Internet, making plans and searching for a national musical headliner. One performer, 18-year-old Elizabeth Phillips, was shaken as a baby and lost her sight. She will perform a song she wrote called Shaken Angels.

Goree gets tired but always keeps going.

"What other option is there?" she says. "Get in bed and pull the covers over your head? There is no other option but to get out there and keep plugging away and hope you can make a difference."

In a corner stands a glass case containing her source of inspiration. On each of five shelves are the porcelain angel girls that filled Kimber's room before she died. Beside a sleeping angel on the top shelf, a plaque reads: "God bless this child with gentle kindness and fill this little heart with love."

To contact Janet Goree's Kimber Campaign, call the Exchange Center of the Suncoast for the Prevention of Child Abuse at (727) 522-6465.

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