A 7-year-old girl named Sherrice Iverson is murdered and attacked in a casino restroom. Sherrice and her 14-year-old brother Harold went to a casino in Primm to support their father, Leroy Iverson. Iverson didn’t have enough money for a room, so he planned to spend a few hours in the casino while his kids played on the balcony. He told the person in charge that he had done this before without any problems.
Sherrice and Harold were not allowed on the casino floor, so Harold was put in charge of watching over Sherrice. At some point, the siblings split up, and Sherrice started running around the business without being watched. Her dad had to pick her up many times.
Jeremy Strohmeyer, who was 18 at the time, was caught playing with Sherrice at 4 a.m. Later, he followed her into the women’s bathroom, where they kept talking and threw wet rolls of paper towels at each other. David Cash, Strohmeyer’s 17-year-old friend, then went to the women’s bathroom and saw Strohmeyer putting Sherrice in a cell. Cash also saw Strohmeyer put his left hand over Sherrice’s mouth to calm her down while he attacked her with his right hand. Money came out of the bathroom.
Strohmeyer came out twenty minutes after that. He said right away that he had abused and killed Sherrice by strangling her so she couldn’t scream. Strohmeyer saw that Sherrice was still alive as he was leaving, so he twisted her neck to break it. He heard a “loud pop” and saw her body move slightly, so he shook it again “with all his strength” before putting her dead body on the toilet.
Strohmeyer was caught three days later when students saw him on security camera footage and said they knew him.
Strohmeyer was accused of kidnapping, killing, and sexually assaulting a child, and he could have been put to death. As part of a deal, he admitted to first-degree murder, first-degree kidnapping, sexual assault on a minor with serious bodily injury, and sexual assault on a minor. He was given a life sentence with no chance of getting out.
Sherrice’s mother asked that Cash be charged as an addition, but there wasn’t enough evidence against him to do so. He didn’t feel bad about killing, as he told the Los Angeles Times. “I’m not going to let someone else’s life scare me. I’m only worried about myself. I’m not going to lose sleep over somebody else’s problems.”
The Sherrice Iverson bill came about because Sherrice was killed and David Cash did nothing about it.
The bill fairly requires a person with reasonable suspicion that a minor is being sexually attacked to report the crime to the police.