Post by LadyBlue on Sept 23, 2016 12:28:20 GMT -5
The romance of Shannon and Craig
Shannon Jarvis is 39 years old, a single mother who leads afterschool and summer programs for kids. It’s an instinctive calling for a woman who helped raise a younger brother through grueling years of poverty following the death of their mother.
Jarvis’ eldest three children were born to her first husband. They split without bitterness, their friendship intact. The youngest belongs to her second husband, to whom Jarvis is still legally married, but hasn’t seen for the greater part of four years. He went to prison for assaulting his former girlfriend.
Craig Champa arrived in Jarvis’ life around the same time her second marriage disintegrated under the crush of drugs and infidelity. While her husband dated another woman, Jarvis was drawn to her 45-year-old neighbor who lived across the alley. Champa, an even-keeled, broad-shouldered man with a magnanimous smile, was eager to please. She found him a willing distraction.
“You burned yourself”
Champa is of old Chisholm blood, a high school dropout who works on and off in construction. He fathered two children with an ex-girlfriend of 16 years, but was never abusive.
But unlike Jarvis, whose record showed only traffic violations leading up to their relationship, Champa had an early and extensive introduction to criminal justice.
At 21, Champa received three felony convictions after an accomplice, Robert Rajala, implicated him in a rash of four-wheeler thefts.
While the cases were pending, Champa sent Rajala a letter at the Saginaw, Minnesota workhouse.
“RAJ (fuckhead), you’re a stupid fucken NARK,” it began. “I hope you rot in there! …See you in hell. You burned yourself.”
The letter brought Champa another charge for witness tampering, which was ultimately dropped when he was convicted on other charges.
Some had driven up from the Twin Cities. Others had remained in this small north country town of 5,000. Shannon Jarvis arrived alone.
She’s a scrappy, five-foot-two woman with a nervy voice and choppy hair that looks like she styled it herself, with haste. She’d missed the event the day before — an ATV race through abandoned taconite mines — and hadn’t RSVP’ed for the dinner. Her oversized sunglasses only partially hid an ugly spread of deep maroon bruises, a purple nose, and an upper lip scored with dried blood.
As the night progressed and the party migrated to Tom and Jerry’s bar, Jarvis’ sunglasses came off. She explained that her injuries were the work of her on-again, off-again boyfriend. Alternating between blaming her own stupidity for staying with him and a determined effort to drink, forget, and have a good time, she nonetheless echoed a despondent refrain:
He’s going to kill me. The cops won’t do anything. No one can help me.
Jarvis’ story elicited uncomfortable sympathy from her former classmates. They said they weren’t familiar with her situation. Nor did they really know her boyfriend, Craig Champa, other than that he’s the nephew of former Chisholm Mayor John Champa. They weren’t prepared, several drinks in, to dive deep into a domestic history that is long, complex, and convoluted. It sure looked bad, but it was none of anyone’s business.
itemprop
Shannon Jarvis is pictured two days after the incident in Buyck, where her boyfriend Craig Champa allegedly picked her up and threw her down. Photo by Susan Du.
Jarvis’ frustration stems from the belief that the Chisholm Police Department seems to share that opinion.
Over four years of what she describes as her boyfriend’s increasingly violent behavior, police have filed 35 reports. They show that officers’ preferred method of dealing with Jarvis’ calls is to send Champa home — two houses away from hers — and tell him to leave her alone. If police can’t find him when they arrive, they consider the matter closed.
With nondescript phrases that conclude several reports — “Multiple prior calls for these parties,” “All parties again were advised to stay away from each other” — police reports and neighbors speak to a history of alleged stalking, in which Jarvis describes Champa breaking into her house, sitting across the street staring at her, pulling out her plants, and sending hundreds of texts in a single night that vacillate spastically from pestering to flirting to threatening.
With Chisholm police reluctant to investigate, Champa has learned that he can do nearly anything and get away with it, Jarvis says.
The romance of Shannon and Craig
Shannon Jarvis is 39 years old, a single mother who leads afterschool and summer programs for kids. It’s an instinctive calling for a woman who helped raise a younger brother through grueling years of poverty following the death of their mother.
Jarvis’ eldest three children were born to her first husband. They split without bitterness, their friendship intact. The youngest belongs to her second husband, to whom Jarvis is still legally married, but hasn’t seen for the greater part of four years. He went to prison for assaulting his former girlfriend.
Craig Champa arrived in Jarvis’ life around the same time her second marriage disintegrated under the crush of drugs and infidelity. While her husband dated another woman, Jarvis was drawn to her 45-year-old neighbor who lived across the alley. Champa, an even-keeled, broad-shouldered man with a magnanimous smile, was eager to please. She found him a willing distraction.
“You burned yourself”
Champa is of old Chisholm blood, a high school dropout who works on and off in construction. He fathered two children with an ex-girlfriend of 16 years, but was never abusive.
But unlike Jarvis, whose record showed only traffic violations leading up to their relationship, Champa had an early and extensive introduction to criminal justice.
At 21, Champa received three felony convictions after an accomplice, Robert Rajala, implicated him in a rash of four-wheeler thefts.
While the cases were pending, Champa sent Rajala a letter at the Saginaw, Minnesota workhouse.
“RAJ (fuckhead), you’re a stupid fucken NARK,” it began. “I hope you rot in there! …See you in hell. You burned yourself.”
The letter brought Champa another charge for witness tampering, which was ultimately dropped when he was convicted on other charges.
A vow to be not that type of woman
Over time Jarvis and Champa merged their lives and began to raise their children together. Champa eased his belongings into Jarvis’ house. When work became scarce, she provided. When Jarvis was short of money for bills, he put gas in her car and bought food for her dogs.
But a possessive temper lurked beneath his disarming charm. He began to take minute notice of Jarvis’ comings and goings and the company she kept. What initially seemed like a budding love’s desire to be close grew to intensive surveillance.
Jarvis’ children were the first to sense the tension. Daughter Mariah Warren, 18, found Champa off-putting, short of words and devoid of warmth.
Mariah watched as the mere presence of her mother’s friends and houseguests incited impulsive bursts of anger from Champa, how he began to accuse her mother of seeing other men. As arguments escalated with alarming frequency, Jarvis assuaged Champa’s insecurities by slowly withdrawing from every personal relationship extraneous to theirs.
"She has barely any friends," Mariah says. "She doesn’t talk to anybody. She’s never off cheating on him, and he would get irritated and freak out on her. I feel like she’s alone, you know. He made her lose all of her friends so he was the only one in her life that she could talk to."
Violence would enter the relationship in 2013.
“An old friend brought his little boy to visit Jarvis one day. After they left, Jarvis returned to painting her back porch. Champa appeared, accusing her of seeing other men behind his back. He knocked the cup of paint out of her hands and tipped her off a stepladder, she says.
Jarvis fought back with all her muster. She was no match for the six-foot, 200-pound man. He beat her on the back porch, she says.
Wounded and enraged, Jarvis resolved not to be the type of woman who suffered a man’s blows. She snuck over to Champa’s house the following day with a can of orange spray paint and splashed the indictment “Woman Abuser” across the front door.
Jarvis was never contacted to explain her actions. She was told only to keep her distance.
Their separation did not last long. Champa proffered apologies and a promise of singular love and happiness if only they could learn to get along. Mariah begged her mother to say no. But Jarvis couldn’t help but love him, she says.
Their on-again, off-again romance persisted into 2014, when Jarvis’ fighting spirit began to wane.
Timothy Olson grew up in Chisholm. After graduation, he moved to Minneapolis and became a union official. On a visit home, he happened upon Jarvis at a bar. The old friends hadn’t seen each other in 20 years. They made a date for lunch.
It was raining the morning he picked her up. As she gathered her purse, Olson recalls thunderous rapping on the front door. He offered to answer. Jarvis warned him not to. It was her boyfriend, she said. He didn’t like her talking to other people.
The knocking continued as Jarvis’ phone buzzed with incessant calls. As the pair quietly waited out the intrusion, Olson got the sense that his friend was trapped inside her own home. Though he privately questioned the dynamics of Jarvis’ love life, he didn’t press for explanation.
Eventually the knocking subsided and they drove to Valentini’s. No sooner had their coffee arrived when Champa stormed in, soaking wet from the rain and trembling with fury.
What the fuck are you doing here? Olson says Champa yelled at Jarvis. And who the fuck are you?
Champa accused Olson of trying to take his woman. He postured to fight.
Olson, who at 6 foot 4 inches stood half a head taller, realized Champa must have walked all over town before finding his car in Valentini’s parking lot.
More here:
www.citypages.com/news/hes-going-to-kill-me-police-indifference-to-a-woman-stalked/394189691
Shannon Jarvis is 39 years old, a single mother who leads afterschool and summer programs for kids. It’s an instinctive calling for a woman who helped raise a younger brother through grueling years of poverty following the death of their mother.
Jarvis’ eldest three children were born to her first husband. They split without bitterness, their friendship intact. The youngest belongs to her second husband, to whom Jarvis is still legally married, but hasn’t seen for the greater part of four years. He went to prison for assaulting his former girlfriend.
Craig Champa arrived in Jarvis’ life around the same time her second marriage disintegrated under the crush of drugs and infidelity. While her husband dated another woman, Jarvis was drawn to her 45-year-old neighbor who lived across the alley. Champa, an even-keeled, broad-shouldered man with a magnanimous smile, was eager to please. She found him a willing distraction.
“You burned yourself”
Champa is of old Chisholm blood, a high school dropout who works on and off in construction. He fathered two children with an ex-girlfriend of 16 years, but was never abusive.
But unlike Jarvis, whose record showed only traffic violations leading up to their relationship, Champa had an early and extensive introduction to criminal justice.
At 21, Champa received three felony convictions after an accomplice, Robert Rajala, implicated him in a rash of four-wheeler thefts.
While the cases were pending, Champa sent Rajala a letter at the Saginaw, Minnesota workhouse.
“RAJ (fuckhead), you’re a stupid fucken NARK,” it began. “I hope you rot in there! …See you in hell. You burned yourself.”
The letter brought Champa another charge for witness tampering, which was ultimately dropped when he was convicted on other charges.
Some had driven up from the Twin Cities. Others had remained in this small north country town of 5,000. Shannon Jarvis arrived alone.
She’s a scrappy, five-foot-two woman with a nervy voice and choppy hair that looks like she styled it herself, with haste. She’d missed the event the day before — an ATV race through abandoned taconite mines — and hadn’t RSVP’ed for the dinner. Her oversized sunglasses only partially hid an ugly spread of deep maroon bruises, a purple nose, and an upper lip scored with dried blood.
As the night progressed and the party migrated to Tom and Jerry’s bar, Jarvis’ sunglasses came off. She explained that her injuries were the work of her on-again, off-again boyfriend. Alternating between blaming her own stupidity for staying with him and a determined effort to drink, forget, and have a good time, she nonetheless echoed a despondent refrain:
He’s going to kill me. The cops won’t do anything. No one can help me.
Jarvis’ story elicited uncomfortable sympathy from her former classmates. They said they weren’t familiar with her situation. Nor did they really know her boyfriend, Craig Champa, other than that he’s the nephew of former Chisholm Mayor John Champa. They weren’t prepared, several drinks in, to dive deep into a domestic history that is long, complex, and convoluted. It sure looked bad, but it was none of anyone’s business.
itemprop
Shannon Jarvis is pictured two days after the incident in Buyck, where her boyfriend Craig Champa allegedly picked her up and threw her down. Photo by Susan Du.
Jarvis’ frustration stems from the belief that the Chisholm Police Department seems to share that opinion.
Over four years of what she describes as her boyfriend’s increasingly violent behavior, police have filed 35 reports. They show that officers’ preferred method of dealing with Jarvis’ calls is to send Champa home — two houses away from hers — and tell him to leave her alone. If police can’t find him when they arrive, they consider the matter closed.
With nondescript phrases that conclude several reports — “Multiple prior calls for these parties,” “All parties again were advised to stay away from each other” — police reports and neighbors speak to a history of alleged stalking, in which Jarvis describes Champa breaking into her house, sitting across the street staring at her, pulling out her plants, and sending hundreds of texts in a single night that vacillate spastically from pestering to flirting to threatening.
With Chisholm police reluctant to investigate, Champa has learned that he can do nearly anything and get away with it, Jarvis says.
The romance of Shannon and Craig
Shannon Jarvis is 39 years old, a single mother who leads afterschool and summer programs for kids. It’s an instinctive calling for a woman who helped raise a younger brother through grueling years of poverty following the death of their mother.
Jarvis’ eldest three children were born to her first husband. They split without bitterness, their friendship intact. The youngest belongs to her second husband, to whom Jarvis is still legally married, but hasn’t seen for the greater part of four years. He went to prison for assaulting his former girlfriend.
Craig Champa arrived in Jarvis’ life around the same time her second marriage disintegrated under the crush of drugs and infidelity. While her husband dated another woman, Jarvis was drawn to her 45-year-old neighbor who lived across the alley. Champa, an even-keeled, broad-shouldered man with a magnanimous smile, was eager to please. She found him a willing distraction.
“You burned yourself”
Champa is of old Chisholm blood, a high school dropout who works on and off in construction. He fathered two children with an ex-girlfriend of 16 years, but was never abusive.
But unlike Jarvis, whose record showed only traffic violations leading up to their relationship, Champa had an early and extensive introduction to criminal justice.
At 21, Champa received three felony convictions after an accomplice, Robert Rajala, implicated him in a rash of four-wheeler thefts.
While the cases were pending, Champa sent Rajala a letter at the Saginaw, Minnesota workhouse.
“RAJ (fuckhead), you’re a stupid fucken NARK,” it began. “I hope you rot in there! …See you in hell. You burned yourself.”
The letter brought Champa another charge for witness tampering, which was ultimately dropped when he was convicted on other charges.
A vow to be not that type of woman
Over time Jarvis and Champa merged their lives and began to raise their children together. Champa eased his belongings into Jarvis’ house. When work became scarce, she provided. When Jarvis was short of money for bills, he put gas in her car and bought food for her dogs.
But a possessive temper lurked beneath his disarming charm. He began to take minute notice of Jarvis’ comings and goings and the company she kept. What initially seemed like a budding love’s desire to be close grew to intensive surveillance.
Jarvis’ children were the first to sense the tension. Daughter Mariah Warren, 18, found Champa off-putting, short of words and devoid of warmth.
Mariah watched as the mere presence of her mother’s friends and houseguests incited impulsive bursts of anger from Champa, how he began to accuse her mother of seeing other men. As arguments escalated with alarming frequency, Jarvis assuaged Champa’s insecurities by slowly withdrawing from every personal relationship extraneous to theirs.
"She has barely any friends," Mariah says. "She doesn’t talk to anybody. She’s never off cheating on him, and he would get irritated and freak out on her. I feel like she’s alone, you know. He made her lose all of her friends so he was the only one in her life that she could talk to."
Violence would enter the relationship in 2013.
“An old friend brought his little boy to visit Jarvis one day. After they left, Jarvis returned to painting her back porch. Champa appeared, accusing her of seeing other men behind his back. He knocked the cup of paint out of her hands and tipped her off a stepladder, she says.
Jarvis fought back with all her muster. She was no match for the six-foot, 200-pound man. He beat her on the back porch, she says.
Wounded and enraged, Jarvis resolved not to be the type of woman who suffered a man’s blows. She snuck over to Champa’s house the following day with a can of orange spray paint and splashed the indictment “Woman Abuser” across the front door.
Jarvis was never contacted to explain her actions. She was told only to keep her distance.
Their separation did not last long. Champa proffered apologies and a promise of singular love and happiness if only they could learn to get along. Mariah begged her mother to say no. But Jarvis couldn’t help but love him, she says.
Their on-again, off-again romance persisted into 2014, when Jarvis’ fighting spirit began to wane.
Timothy Olson grew up in Chisholm. After graduation, he moved to Minneapolis and became a union official. On a visit home, he happened upon Jarvis at a bar. The old friends hadn’t seen each other in 20 years. They made a date for lunch.
It was raining the morning he picked her up. As she gathered her purse, Olson recalls thunderous rapping on the front door. He offered to answer. Jarvis warned him not to. It was her boyfriend, she said. He didn’t like her talking to other people.
The knocking continued as Jarvis’ phone buzzed with incessant calls. As the pair quietly waited out the intrusion, Olson got the sense that his friend was trapped inside her own home. Though he privately questioned the dynamics of Jarvis’ love life, he didn’t press for explanation.
Eventually the knocking subsided and they drove to Valentini’s. No sooner had their coffee arrived when Champa stormed in, soaking wet from the rain and trembling with fury.
What the fuck are you doing here? Olson says Champa yelled at Jarvis. And who the fuck are you?
Champa accused Olson of trying to take his woman. He postured to fight.
Olson, who at 6 foot 4 inches stood half a head taller, realized Champa must have walked all over town before finding his car in Valentini’s parking lot.
More here:
www.citypages.com/news/hes-going-to-kill-me-police-indifference-to-a-woman-stalked/394189691